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IN VACATION AMERICA 



IN VACATION 
AMERICA 



HARRISON RHODES 



ILLUSTRATED BY 
HOWARD GILES 




HARPER 6- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



•7T4r 



In Vacation America 



Copyright, 191S, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published September, 1915 

i-p 



SEP 251915 

©CI.A41iV00 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Salt Water 3 

II. Fresh Water and Inland Valleys ... 31 

III. Springs and Mountains 55 

IV. City Summers 83 

V. Winter Holidays Ill 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Frontispiece 

The Jersey Coast Is, oin the Whole, the Most Poptjlab 
Part of the American Seashore Fac 

Entertaining in Newport Is Merely Part of the 
Day's Work 

Like a Greek Temple on a Green Slope of Parnassus 

Under the Shadow of the Great Cliffs of the 

Palisades 

The Pendulum of Fashion Has Swung Back to White 
Sulphur Springs 

Members of the Old Guard Still Linger at Saratoga 

A Hay-fever Congress in the White Mountains . 

Seclusion Is Not Always Easily Attained .... 

The City Summer Is the General Fate of Humank:ind 

Band Concerts Are the First Training of Our Music- 
loving Public 

Dancing Has Become Our One Great National 
Interest 

A Coney Island Fairyland 

Perpetual Disputations Engross the Benches . . . 

There Is Glamour for Young and Old in the Winter 
Holiday 

An "Afro-mobile" — the Wheel-chair at Palm Beach 

For the Rural Visitor the Boardwalk Has Its Irre- 
sistible Attraction 



42 



1^ 






y 



\/ 



56 
66' 

72 
76 
84' 

92 



100 
104 

112 

116 ^ 

126 / 



SALT WATER 



IN VACATION AMERICA 



I 

SALT WATER 

OUR American summer is hot. To some, heat 
may seem impHcit in the very idea of summer, 
but these people have not cowered over fires in the 
EngHsh June nor wrapped themselves in their furs 
during the Swiss August. Heat, in our habitual 
foreign playground. North Europe, is, except in 
occasional epoch-making years, a thing hoped for 
rather than felt. Young ladies in Edinburgh wear 
white muslin in summer though the snow flies, be- 
cause they know it is summer. But we at home 
need no such fond, martyred belief in the calendar. 
With the coming of the July day that commemorates 
the declaration of our independence of Europe and 
of its weather we can be sure that the sun will blaze 
in a high, clear sky, that blue waters will lap upon 
shining white sands, pine woods grow fragrant and 
mountain valleys softly hazy with the heat; and, 

3 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

when night falls, upon a million front porches the 
nation will sit at ease in a climate where you can 
be out of doors without the fear of rheumatism. 

The heat makes it our first impulse in summer to 
plunge straight into the cool, kindly oceans that wash 
our coasts, to go "to the shore," and to eat "shore 
dinners " — to employ the pleasant indigenous phrases. 
So the first impulse, in any series of articles on 
American holidays, is to wade at once into salt water 
— to write of the seaside and the sea. 

Sea-bathing in this country has for decades as- 
tonished the visiting foreigner by its ease and free- 
dom, and by the pleasant and innocent commingling 
of the sexes in the wave and upon the sands. " Mixed 
bathing" has never even existed as a phrase in our 
language. All bathing is mixed. In the legendary 
past, by going to remote Prince Edward Island in 
the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence you could find a 
region so British that the sexes were kept separate 
in the water, but it is scarcely to be supposed that 
such a prudish Arcadia still exists. Our native cus- 
tom is to mingle freely, to sprawl for hours before and 
after the bath upon the sands, to indulge in races and 
amiable horse-play, and to see no harm in it. But 
just this American freedom, for the most part un- 
known in Europe, where they ordinarily rush straight 
to and from the bath, engenders our own special 
kind of prudishness — our care about costume. 



SALT WATER 



The other day at Atlantic City the crowd upon 
the beach mobbed and nearly killed a woman the 
skirt of whose pretty purple bathing-suit was, they 
considered, slashed too high. The scene suggests 
the palmy days of the Roman Colosseum. And the 
barbaric effect is heightened by the constant reports 
nowadays of mayors and chiefs-of-police giving or- 
ders that women whose dresses do not please them 
shall be burned at the stake — ^no, of course, only 
arrested. These are the moments when one feels 
favorably inclined to European customs; but the 
memory of foreign beaches, especially in that shame- 
less Germany, persuades one that our efforts to keep 
some trifling excuse for a skirt upon our women are, 
though unduly violent, well judged. 

There is actually more water in the Pacific than 
in the Atlantic. But the latter, being for the 
greater part of the country more accessible, is fuller 
of people, if not of salt water. The thunder of the 
Pacific surf comes in occasionally, even over the 
mountain barriers and the long stretches of land 
between. All along the lovely western coast, we 
know, lovely and agreeable Westerners disport them- 
selves. It is only because California has so insisted 
upon her claims as a winter resort that most of us 
know her so little in summer, know so little of that 
cosmopolitanism of the western slope, half pine 
woods and half Paris. The Atlantic, furthermore. 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

has upon many of us almost ancestral claims to 
loyalty. 

The Atlantic seaboard stretches from the Floridian 
sands, where you can bathe even in midwinter, to 
the Maine rocks, where you cannot do so even in 
midsummer. It has every variety of climate and of 
social and unsocial activity. In its waves stands 
America, if not naked, at least unashamed, and 
ready for the observation of our philosophic eye. 

It is probably still right to speak of the seashore 
as if it were the country, but, as a matter of fact, 
from Bar Harbor to Cape May it is almost as solidly 
occupied as the town. The most amazing degree of 
congestion is found along the Jersey coast, where for 
fifty miles south along the beach from Sandy Hook 
there runs a solid crowded street of hotels and houses, 
and behind them, at frequent points, colonies and 
towns of more hotels and houses stretching their 
necks, as it were, for a glimpse of water and a breath 
of air. The edges of Long Island and the coasts 
of Connecticut and Rhode Island are rapidly ap- 
proaching this condition, and the famous North and 
South shores of the Massachusetts coast are nowa- 
days merely lovely Bostonian suburbs. Our zeal 
for having summer homes outside the cities is won- 
derful. We cannot altogether desert business, but 
we hire "club cars" on the trains, and engage 
staterooms on steamers by the season, so that with 




THE JERSKY COAST IS, ON THE WHOLE, THE MOST POPULAR PART OF THE AMERICAN 

SEASHORE 



SALT WATER 



no waste of time, morning or evening, we may play 
auction, dictate letters to our secretaries, or, with 
other millionaires, form combinations in restraint 
of trade. Thus we commute incredible distances 
and spread our great cities thin over all the adjacent 
states. 

The American seaside, with its enormous popula- 
tion, has something majestic and almost frightening 
about it. It gives you a vision of the vastness of our 
country, its wealth, its teeming millions. Atlantic 
City alone, for example, could quite suffice for France, 
were it transported across the Atlantic; and Asbury 
Park would accommodate Belgium and Holland — 
with suitable alterations to please the tastes of the 
jaded inhabitants of continental Europe. We over- 
crowd dozens of such places at the slightest notice 
and upon the slightest provocation, and have, besides, 
a hundred others. 

The Jersey coast is, on the whole, the most popu- 
lar part of the American seashore, the most charac- 
teristic, the most democratic, the most intensely 
American. It has no natural advantages, but it 
has its nearness to the sea and, which is more im- 
portant, to Philadelphia and New York. How near 
New York it is may be illustrated by an event which 
happened a few years ago on the beach before a 
charming house at Seabright. One lovely morning 
there floated in with the dawn a baby elephant. 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

lately deceased at Coney Island, across the waters 
of the Bay! 

To catalogue the Jersey coast is like cataloguing 
America. Nothing proves this better than that, 
starting in from the north, one must begin at once 
with a great Jewish settlement. If not the leading, 
the Hebrew is one of the leading races of New 
York. To find it in complete possession of historic 
Long Branch and Elberon need really surprise no 
one. It need surely irritate no one, either. If the 
Jew be socially "pushing," as he is often alleged to 
be, it is odd that he should thus segregate himself 
and content himself to "push," if at all, among his 
own race. 

Let us begin with Long Branch. Long Branch 
has memories. The odd little gilded domes, like 
those of a Russian church, still mark what were 
once the great gambling-rooms. And here and 
there hotels and cottages have the odd look peculiar 
to the architecture of the middle of the last century. 
Elberon still keeps its air of old-fashioned distinc- 
tion, with the earliest examples of "artistic" archi- 
tecture in the country sitting calmly on broad, 
smooth, velvety lawns. It Is hard to realize that in 
the late fifties Long Branch Itself was an upstart 
watering-place, daring to rival Rockaway, where the 
"Marine Pavilion" (delightful hotel name!) had been 

for years the seaside resort of New York's best so- 

8 



I 



SALT WATER 



ciety. The Jersey resort's fortune was made when 
President Grant accepted the gift of a cottage there, 
and came to drive along the front in a barouche 
drawn by four horses. This seems, in face of the 
modesty of equipage now prevalent in administra- 
tion circles, magnificent. But, on the other hand, 
probably none even of our Cabinet ladies would 
consider, as Mrs. Grant was reported to have done, 
that she had fully discharged the duties of hospital- 
ity in offering the visitor, who had "dropped in" of 
an evening, a "simple soda-cracker." Perhaps it 
was the President's cottage which gave something of 
a political tone to Long Branch. The people who 
went there were important rather than fashionable. 
They were of the nobility of Tammany and of that 
large class which has always existed in New York, 
rich, fond of expensive dress and good living, but 
with no pretense whatever to being "in society." 
They supported the gambling-club (from the con- 
taminating influences of which they chivalrously 
protected the ladies by excluding them) and the 
races at Monmouth Park. They have vanished 
now, and Long Branch and Elberon would have gone 
to seed completely were it not for this later Oriental 
invasion. Now the hotels go briskly, with the ad- 
mirable cuisine upon which the prosperous American 
Jew insists everywhere. As to the kind of resort he 
builds when he starts afresh, attention is requested 

9 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

to Deal Beach, just south. It would be hard to 
match anywhere in the world the succession of sum- 
mer palaces which line the main road southward. 
Even Newport has nothing to rival the extravagance 
of these villas. 

What exclusiveness there is on the Jersey coast is 
mostly Hebraic. South of Deal you enter into a 
great good-natured American welter of all classes of 
the community, more exhilarating and stimulating 
to some observers than the merely fashionable life 
of any race can be. Great cities now crowd the 
sea-front, and green trees become almost as rare as 
horses in Venice. Poor nature is not asked to pro- 
vide, unaided, the amusements which summer hu- 
manity craves. The majestic and hitherto untamed 
surges of the Atlantic bow in amazed admiration be- 
fore gigantic piers which bear aloft "whirlwind 
vaudeville" and "one-step" dancing, the wild music 
for which pulsates in the soft, warm night. Theaters 
and "movies" abound. Lion-tamers and snake- 
charmers and curio-shops flourish. Thousands stroll 
up and down the front or swing contentedly in rock- 
ing-chairs under great municipal shelters kept for 
ever littered with peanut-shells and crumpled cast- 
off copies of the yellow journals. All through the 
day thousands enter the surf. Here in the waves 
democracy comes into its own. There is but one 
kind of exclusiveness (and this is an exclusiveness 

10 



SALT WATER 



which from another point of view is great generosity) : 
both Atlantic City and Asbury Park provide "Jim 
Crow" sections of the beach, and special bath- 
houses, from which the Afro-American, a comic but 
often agreeable sight, emerges for his dip. 

At Asbury Park the "turkey trot" when it arrived 
was not thought well of. Boys and girls labored in 
the dance as in agony under this restraint of public 
opinion; they obviously knew the trot and loved it 
well. But they were perhaps happy in the con- 
sciousness that they were striking that note of "re- 
finement" which is so characteristic a feature of 
our American life — which is, indeed, our chief vul- 
garity. The refined note blends in an exquisite 
harmony with the home note, for which, indeed, we 
are justly famous. The English, equally famous 
for it, advertise constantly the possibility of securing 
at the seaside "a home from home." An Asbury 
Park hotel-keeper, possibly in secret cynically doubt- 
ful (as some of us are at times) as to the real comfort 
of a home, advertises a "table better than mother's" 
— an extraordinarily artful attack, it seems to the 
writer, upon "mother." 

The home note almost inevitably has to do with 
home cooking. It was at Atlantic City that a fe- 
male purchaser of "patty irons" was returning 
them as unmanageable to a magnificent lady dem- 
onstrator. The latter rather scornfully put the re- 

11 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

jected irons to the test, and in public view at once 
produced beautiful crisp, brown patties. The com- 
plainant stood meditative and slightly abashed. 
Then she jerked her shoulder, a little angrily, at the 
weary husband who accompanied her. 

"Well, maybe it's because he ain't well," she 
explained to the surrounding group, "and I had to 
try to make them patties with diabetic flour — !" 

The home note is not, however, dependent on 
such minor matters as cuisine. The climax of As- 
bury Park's season, the frenzied, passionate moment 
of its pursuit of pleasure, is, if you please, the famous 
baby-parade, where thousands of blameless infants 
are entered in competition. There is something at 
once preposterously comic and incredibly touching 
in this adaptation of the carnival to the needs of a 
nation really simple, home-loving, and not really 
fete-keeping. The baby-parade is in some mys- 
terious way under the patronage of a Queen of Car- 
nival, Titania. (Her ways did not always please 
Oberon. Is she perhaps not quite the person for 
Asbury Park to countenance?) The Asbury Park 
carnival has existed so long now that another very 
characteristic American institution has become pos- 
sible, a congress — of ex-Queens of Carnival! 

In the late seventies and early eighties Asbury 
Park, by contrast with its neighbor, Ocean Grove, was 
thought "fast," at least so the professional news- 

12 



SALT WATER 



paper humorists of that time used to say. Ocean 
Grove's grimness has softened a httle with the years, 
but it still remains an admirable example of a kind 
of resort invented by us here in America and existing 
only here. It is essentially a "camp-meeting" 
ground, and it combines the pursuit of both pleasure 
and salvation. Its gaieties become almost uncon- 
trollable in August, when the oratorio of "The 
Messiah" is sung at the Auditorium and a "Venetian 
Night" takes place on Wesley Lake, the waters of 
which a sterner earlier generation of Methodists 
might have thought would refuse to support such 
an un-Wesleyan craft as a gondola! There is much 
philosophy to be extracted from Ocean Grove, but 
there is more, later, to be drawn from Chautauqua, 
where education has been added to pleasure and 
salvation as a goal. But the reader should not 
meditate scoffingly upon Ocean Grove, for a mere 
sea-bathing place which in this capacious way can 
synthesize so many of the great and serious tenden- 
cies of a country is not to be taken lightly. 

As to Atlantic City, the pen fairly itches to attack 
it — if that figure of speech be either polite or possible. 
But Atlantic City is deathless; it goes through no 
period of hibernation, and it must be reserved for 
treatment when we come to speak of winter days. 
It will be better to turn back and go eastward and 

northward from New York. 

13 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

Long Island's only real claim to merit is that it 
causes Long Island Sound. It is itself a stretch of 
country of extreme dullness, becoming, near Ne\^ 
York, poignantly desolate. But its proximity to 
the metropolis makes it the arena, as it were, of some 
of our most violent social activities. Its northern 
and inland regions are, however, really autumn, 
spring, and even winter resorts. We may at once, 
therefore, hasten to its south shore, and to South- 
ampton. This south shore is, for Long Island, a 
comparatively pretty region. There are sand-dunes, 
there are the Shinnecock Hills, and there is the great 
wind from the Atlantic blowing nobly over the land. 
The villages themselves are pleasant old settlements 
with a lingering air of colonial days. But, God 
bless us, these are not Southampton's preoccupations. 

Southampton is the briskest, gayest, newest power 
in the world of fashion. She announces calmly that 
Newport has had its day. She has the parties, one 
every minute, and all on the high-speed clutch of 
pleasure. Best of all for her, in the kind of Balkan 
warfare in which she is engaged, she has the men. 
Proximity to the great cities makes it easier to get 
men, who, like fresh vegetables, are always easier 
to find in town than in the country. Bar Harbor, 
in the remote northeast, faces a crisis if her supply 
of men less than seventy years old cannot be in- 
creased. And Newport secretly knows that she has 

14 



SALT WATER 



become too dependent on callow boys of twenty. 
There is, happily, no hope of a leisure class in our 
country. And the real men of business, worth 
talking to and worth marrying, prefer a journey of 
two hours to one of six or eighteen. The war is on, 
and Southampton shows youth, vigor, and courage. 
But the older places have an immense reserve capi- 
tal of prestige and of the best-known names; so 
the end is not yet. 

The long, lovely reaches of Long Island Sound 
have made possible the sport of yachting. In most 
places in the world the motor-boat has almost com- 
pletely displaced the sailing-craft. But in the Sound 
this is not yet so. On a fine day the white wings 
flutter forth from the deep coves of the island's 
north shore and from the harbors of the mainland; 
on such days as those of the Larchmont Regatta it 
would be almost impossible to say whether the sea 
view was more sapphire-blue water or snow-white 
canvas. When August comes, the yachts stream 
eastward to New London, where the stately Thames 
comes down to salt water. Here is the rendezvous 
of the great summer cruise of the New York Yacht 
Club past Newport and around the Cape to Marble- 
head, which brings new gaiety to all these eastern 
waters. 

If the reader's yacht is in commission he will find 
it the pleasantest conveyance to Newport. But the 

15 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

train will take him there. And on the train he will 
at once see an indication that it is not entirely the 
love of cool airs and of blue skies and of the pleas- 
ures of the countryside which is luring his fellow- 
passengers to the summer capital. A famous weekly 
journal of society, nowadays not considered the best 
form elsewhere, is the chief reading on the afternoon 
express. Not all who read so passionately in the 
parlor-car of Newport's gaieties can later be ob- 
served quite in the heart of them. But this fact is 
eminently significant. The interest felt in Newport 
society by those in it is doubtless keen; but it can 
never be so keen as that felt by those not in it. By 
this is not meant unhappy social strugglers, if these 
delightful creatures of fiction really do exist, but 
the countless newspaper-readers, largely in the West, 
who have neither wish nor expectation ever to tread 
the sands of Bailey's Beach, but are for all that never 
one instant out of touch with the activities of our 
*'very best people." Theirs is indeed a Newport it 
would be pleasant to visit, where the feet on the 
bathing-sands are constantly cut by the diamonds 
and rubies dropped there by careless queens of 
fashion, where rakes and lovely female debauchees are 
constantly pledging one another in the wine-cup, 
and where hot-breathed foreign noblemen for ever 
skulk upon the trail of heiresses like the wild beasts 

of the jungle. The sands are, as a matter of fact, 

16 



SALT WATER 



unlittered by gems, the consumption of mineral 
waters is amazing, and the foreign noblemen eat 
from the hand. 

Newport is our greatest invention in watering- 
places. There is nothing at all like it anywhere else 
in the world. At first glance Coney Island would 
appear to many people more characteristically 
American, and Newport indeed a mere snobbish 
imitation of Europe. But if there is anything like 
Newport abroad, it has escaped at least the present 
writer's notice, whereas something very like the 
admirable Coney he could duplicate in several 
quarters of the globe. Newport is the only water- 
ing-place in the world where there are no hotels 
and no hotel life, no fashionable promenade, no 
scene of gaiety accessible to the stranger for an 
admission fee. On ordinary mornings the tourist 
penetrating the Casino might see a few young peo- 
ple in flannels playing tennis, and a scant dozen 
of their elders dropping in for a moment to say 
good morning or to deliver some message. He 
might with extra-good luck observe one of the queens 
of fashion drinking an orangeade. That would be, 
with the single exception of tennis week, about all he 
would observe. He would, of course, be free to walk 
the weary length of Bellevue Avenue between clipped 
green hedges, and see the pleasant Newport houses 
— only a few of them are "palaces." But nobody 

17 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

would be stirring in the houses and no one walking 
in the Avenue. An occasional motor would roll by, 
that is all. He could also take that pretty walk along 
the cliffs and see more pleasant houses — still only 
a few of them "palaces." He might, if the fates so 
incline, perhaps see a fashionable footman at the 
window; he could scarcely hope for the butler. 
He might, if it pleased him, watch people come to 
and from the beach — a dull amusement. By night 
he could see the Avenue whirring at half past eight, 
the dinner hour. And, strolling through the night, 
he might here and there observe lines of motors 
waiting under the shadowy trees, and even hear 
dance music beating in the calm, soft darkness. 
Newport presents, in fact, a singular impression of 
quietness, of distinction, of an existence not wholly 
in the public eye. 

If ladies in Newport are not much in the public 
eye, they are, nevertheless, we may feel assured, 
very much and very constantly in some eye, prefer- 
ably male. Perhaps this is accomplished as pleas- 
antly as anywhere at Bailey's Beach, which, though 
a rendezvous at the most crowded moments of only 
a couple of hundred people, is still the best rendez- 
vous. The bathing-suits are extraordinarily pretty, 
and no lady feels that one need last her the whole 
season. There are pleasant dark colors, black with 
rich green or blue or purple. And there are shin- 

18 



SALT WATER 



ing "confections" of apple-green and faint rose-pink 
and lavender. It lias been discovered that lace, if 
necessary, can brave the surf. And there are now 
queer water-proof flowers which can fasten a bodice 
or adorn a cap. It is pleasant to enter the sea with 
such lovely creatures; it is pleasant to sit upon its 
adjacent sands with others equally lovely whose 
filmy silk and lace and muslin frocks rival the bath- 
ing-suits in charm. It is pleasant to repair from 
their side to a large lunch — if not large in number of 
guests, at least large in quantity of food. It will 
be pleasant later to go to a larger dinner and a still 
larger ball. 

"Entertaining" is in Newport merely part of the 
day's work. There are so many houses, so much 
food, so many chefs, so much champagne and min- 
eral water, that the difficulty is almost greater in 
finding guests for the parties than in finding parties 
for the guests. This permits the hostess to be rele- 
gated to an inferior and suppliant position, and allows 
the very finest flowering of the new manners, which 
are always easy and informal and are founded upon 
the essential fact about parties, that they are in- 
tended wholly for the pleasure and convenience of 
the guest. A charming debutante at noon begged 
a hostess to allow her to come to dine that evening. 
There was a big party at eight-thirty. At eight- 
forty-five the hostess received a little note saying 

19 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

the debutante was so sorry, she found she couldn't 
dine. It is to be presumed that at seven-thirty she 
heard of a better party and — noblesse oblige! An- 
other evening a guest arrived late for an eight-o'clock 
dinner. The hostess, a poor, old-fashioned creature, 
thought to ease the culprit's situation by saying, 
"Oh, my dear, I suppose you thought it was a half- 
past-eight dinner." The lady turned on her sharp- 
ly and said, coldly, "Not at all. I knew it was eight 
o'clock, but it is only a quarter to nine now!" 

There are things in Newport softer than its man- 
ners (though all its manners are not like that). 
The climate and the landscape are both gentle, 
permitting hedges to thrive and gardens to come to 
beautiful maturity. And the old town, the pretty 
provincial capital that the French officers during 
the Revolution found so gay and so civilized, still 
keeps its polite air. Early in its history it grew 
rich trading in rum and slaves and settled down to 
an easy, luxurious existence in these mild, salt airs. 
In the first half of the last century, rich Southern 
planters began to come here; indeed, they discov- 
ered Newport before Boston or New York, and per- 
haps gave it some of the amenity of tone which 
lingers. The navy still enlivens it, fills its streets 
with jolly tars and dashing oflBcers. Great warships 
lie off its harbor, their grim gray decks gay with 
flowers and bunting and lovely young girls and 

20 



SALT WATER 



midshipmen fox- trot ting. Newport is historic; it 
gives you strongly the sense of how long we have 
been idle and pleasure-loving in America, and of how 
hard at it we still are. 

Part of Newport is the trip to Narragansett Pier, 
and Narragansett, of course, returns the compli- 
ment. In the classic days of the last century the 
pier was one of the early cocktail-drinking centers 
of the country, and was popularly supposed to be 
generally going at a pace which Newport regarded 
with public disapproval and secret envy. All this 
dashing reputation seems to have passed away, 
though its renown for the beauty of its women still 
persists, and goddesses from Baltimore and Phila- 
delphia still tread its sands. Narragansett is now a 
serious sportsman's place, the summer's greatest 
polo-playing center. The roads near by clatter with 
ponies' hoofs, and are alive with athletic, brown- 
skinned young men rushing to and fro in motors. 
There are games every day; the lovely green fields, 
with their view of blue water, grow gay with the 
bright coats of the players, while the club inclosure 
for spectators flowers like a parterre of tulips. 

It is very pleasant, this corner by Narragansett 
Bay, before we turn the Cape and definitely go 
north. Off in the sun-warmed sea lie Block Island, 
famous for deep-sea fishing and lack of mosquitoes; 
Marthas Vineyard, crowded with pleasant, simple 

21 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

summer people; and the outpost Nantucket — a 
grassy, wind-swept island where houses of whalers 
still exist, with strange foreign gimcraeks in the 
parlor, and where there was — and probably still is — 
a town crier. And here, on the south shore, is a toy 
village, Siasconset, where a glorified sort of "light 
housekeeping" goes on and the actress secures her 
coat of tan. The guide-book of 1855, when people 
did not travel so far afield for their holidays, speaks 
of it as the "Saratoga of the Island," and alleges that 
it is resorted to by the rich inhabitants of Nantucket ! 

With Cape Cod you definitely leave New York 
and its influence behind — no matter how many New- 
Yorkers may say they live there. It is a long spit 
of sands; at Provincetown, among the dunes, all the 
earth for the gardens has been carefully fetched from 
the mainland. Its quaint villages, its cranberry- 
bogs, its huckleberries, its roads which ought only 
to be traversed in a "buggy," are all authentically 
of Massachusetts. Even the Portuguese who in- 
habit Provincetown, the Cape's tip, seem to belong 
there. It is a country in which to eat clam chowder 
and to remember that, in his day, the great Daniel 
Webster was the best cook of it in all New England. 

They say that the difference between the North 
and South shores is that on the first you must, and 
on the second you need not, dress for dinner. And 
it is alleged that the dressing is made necessary by 

22 






SALT WATER 



the presence of Western millionaires, who thus testi- 
fy to an uneasy desire to make sure that they were 
right in not going to Newport. There is something 
very significant in this descent of the West upon the 
coasts of culture. The Guide Book of 1855 says of 
Nahant that "the refined and intelligent character 
of its visitors makes it indeed a peerless resort." 
Some such thought as this still flares like a beacon, 
lighting the rude pilgrims of the West to the Athe- 
nian countryside. When they first came they en- 
countered difficulties which at once irritated and 
exhilarated them. There were, for example, plain- 
appearing maiden ladies, dressed in black silks and 
bonnets, and not rich, every one said, who quite re- 
fused to part with the choice bits of land on which 
stood their summer cottages for all the gold of Pitts- 
burg. And there were quiet people, with those 
odd Boston names, who didn't seem to care to dine 
out. "Pride's Crossing" was perhaps not ill-named! 
Now things are easier; the Bostonians are coming 
to like the smell of new money and to enjoy the 
greater kindliness and zest of living that have come 
out of the breezier West. 

As the train starts "down east" from Portland 
you will note that, instead of the copies of the society 
weekly purveyed to those on the road to Newport, 
to Bar Harbor pilgrims are offered checkerberry 
lozenges. Munching them — if you have the cour- 
'3 23 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

age of your convictions — you can catch the full 
flavor of the long Maine journey through the pines 
to the romantic greenwood island of Mount Desert 
— you crunch between your teeth, as it were, the 
sense of its remoteness, of its cool, clean air, of its 
American tone, as authentically indigenous as the 
lozenges. Man has built extensively upon this 
rocky Maine coast, without considerably altering its 
aspect. They have developed there a fashion in 
houses, in no sense to be called a style of architec- 
ture, which in some happy way suits the woods and 
cliffs. It is really only comfortable carpentry, a 
piling of square boxes. But the colors which the 
almost universally shingled sides and roofs take on — 
green, leaf -brown, or lichen-gray — blend almost in- 
distinguishably with the rocks and woods. This is 
as it should be; God did so much for the region that 
the less man does the better. 

Even Bar Harbor, the island's chief center of 
civilization and luxury, still keeps the feeling of 
simplicity, the kind of deference to Nature and her 
ways which is really one of the prettiest and most 
winning of our American qualities. The Bar Har- 
bor hotels are piquantly expensive, but their ele- 
gance (it unquestionably exists) is managed in a 
very low key of careful simplicity — they smell of 
pine shingles. People still walk in Bar Harbor — 
the enthusiastic inhabitants tell you that there are 

24 



SALT WATER 



over one hundred miles of footpaths on the island, 
and they would appear to be urging you to traverse 
every inch of them. In the freshness of a late Au- 
gust or September morning it would be hard not to 
wish to join some of the pleasant bands starting 
forth, even the young women equipped with busi- 
ness-like walking-sticks. They still drive the quaint 
and delightful horse, of which some fine specimens 
are to be seen by the curious traveler. But here at 
last we are in a real storm-center — all questions 
concerning the island of Mount Desert sink into in- 
significance compared with the question of the 
motor-car. 

Until a year or two ago the horse, upon this island, 
was the uncrowned king. Motors were excluded, 
and old gentlemen who, upon the mainland, would 
have worked themselves into a frenzy against mod- 
ern innovations, rocked tranquilly upon verandas or 
drove to and fro in trim "cut-unders" of "natural- 
wood" finish. Then the "native" vote decided to 
admit automobiles — it was as if the barriers to the 
Faubourg St. -Germain were down. It was said 
that this proceeded from an unholy thirst for the 
motorists' gold, but it is more probable that the 
villagers, already enriched by years of city patron- 
age, were determined to ride in motors themselves. 
They manifest, however, every wish to attract the 
new "touring trade." One hotel advertises, "Tour- 

25 



IN VACATION AMERICA 



ists can drive to side entrance, go to a room and clean 
up before mingling with guests." Is this not naively 
attributing to motorists a delightful but rare deli- 
cacy of feeling? Meanwhile a Homeric contro- 
versy rages as to the effect motors have had upon 
the village's prosperity, and at the other end of the 
island, Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor, firm in 
the older faith, exist in the proud unmotored se- 
clusion which must distinguish Lhasa in the rare- 
fied air of the Thibetan plateau. 

Wherewith we make an easy transition to the 
question of Bar Harbor's air and climate, which are, 
even more than the beauty of mountains and valleys, 
its lures. There is, let it be frankly admitted, fog 
at Bar Harbor. A characteristic native story is of 
some shinglers at work upon a barn who found, 
when the dense fog lifted, that they had shingled 
three feet beyond the roof's edge! But for the 
most part the air is an amazing compound of moun- 
tain and sea, pine and salt, with that tonic quality 
so optimistically alleged (by teetotalers mostly) to 
be "like champagne." You cannot be very hot in 
this Maine air. What is more, it would seem that 
you cannot die in it. The place teems with the 
aged rich. They bring them up, almost on stretchers, 
in the early summer. They send them down in the 
autumn, merry as larks and ready for a hard winter 
m town. For them (while the young people play 

26 




LIKE A GREEK TEMPLE ON A GREEN SLOPE OF PARNASSUS 



SALT WATER 



tennis or swim in a pool which slightly mitigates the 
rigors of the bath) art flourishes mildly here among 
the pines. A detachment from the Boston Sym- 
phony Orchestra plays the classics, and then, with 
almost willing resignation, for a half-hour before 
lunch the latest fox-trots, to which the young dance 
vigorously. A little outside the village stands a 
really beautiful theater, like a Greek temple on a 
green slope of Parnassus, where at intervals con- 
certs, plays, masques, and pretty open-air dancing 
are to be seen. You drive away from them as the 
sun sets beyond the unspoiled sylvan country. The 
air is crisp and cool. You know you will dine with 
pleasant, well-bred, respectable people, and that you 
will willingly go early to bed. The Maine life is, in 
short, that famous "simple life" luxuriously lived, 
the return to nature with a good chef and a car- 
riage and pair. It is sane and health-giving; and 
it is, thank fortune, sometimes a little dull. For 
dullness gives you time to thread the woods, to 
climb the hills, to see the clear, cold water lapping 
on the granite shores, and to watch the canopy of 
stars by night. These islands scattered so profusely 
in this northern sea are in themselves the prettiest 
thing the Atlantic coast has to show. Again, it must 
be repeated that the best thing we have done to 
them is to spoil them so little. 

Indeed, salt water, the great ocean always beating 

27 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

upon our coast, is too vast for us to spoil. Even 
where we congregate most thickly by its edge, the 
sea itself we do not change. Its breakers curl over 
as majestically at Atlantic City as if they rolled in 
upon the untrodden sands of some South Sea isle. 
They invite us not only to coolness, but to some 
serenity of spirit. They send us back to life — for 
life is, for most of us, the town — ready to endure 
the winter — which, after all, allows hardly more than 
sufficient time for the bathing-suit to become dry 
enough to be put on for next summer's swim. 



FRESH WATER AND INLAND 
VALLEYS 



II 

FRESH WATER AND INLAND VALLEYS 

FOR the summer holidays America is equipped 
with two of the very best oceans, and in addi- 
tion she is furnished with most of the fresh water 
in the world. The comparison here is made directly 
with Europe — for statistics as to the flow of the 
Amazon, the Zambesi, or the Yang-tse-Kiang are of 
no importance in planning the ordinary six weeks' 
vacation. Europe has a few rivers which have 
been dredged till they will float a rowboat, and an 
occasional lake where a slow steamer, if it stops 
often enough, may make a six hours' run, while 
America is intersected by great rivers, dotted with 
lakes which are like dew upon the green country- 
side, and bounded along its northern frontier by 
blue inland seas, the noblest bodies of fresh water 
in the world. 

In proud simplicity we call them merely the 
Great Lakes, but familiarity has perhaps made us 
lose something of that romantic boastful quality in 
the phrase which a foreigner might catch as he 

31 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

stood for the first time in his Hfe on a beach by 
water that was not salt and strained his eyes toward 
a distant landless horizon. They are indeed the 
Great Lakes of the world, and the cataract where 
they pour their waters toward their last brother, 
Ontario, and the distant great river which at last 
carries them seaward to a worthy rival, the Atlantic, 
is the world's Great Falls. f 

Niagara is the spectacular center of the whole 
great system of fresh waters flowing toward the 
Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was for a century the 
country's one Great Sight. No visiting foreigner 
dreamed of missing it, no American in foreign parts 
would have dared call himself an American unless 
he could tell how he had seen his land's greatest 
wonder toss its iridescent spray on high. "See 
Niagara first" was the unformulated maxim of 
those earlier days — the writer himself as a boy 
heard a briskly patriotic lady refuse a trip abroad 
solely on the plea that she had never seen Niagara 
Falls! 

There was something almost sacramental in the 
trip. Marriage, indeed, was scarcely legal or decent 
unless the visit to the altar was immediately supple- 
mented by a trip to Niagara. Those were the days 
when the honeymoon was "what it used to be." 
Over Niagara's gorge and rushing waters it hung 

benignantly, always at its full. And in the corridors 

Si 



FRESH WATER 



of the Falls hotels the miserable unmarried for ever 
bruised their feet upon Hymeneal rice. The " funny- 
columns" of the newspapers could not have existed 
without the Niagara wedding-trip. 

There was, indeed, a whole cataract literature, and 
even before you made their personal acquaintance 
you knew all about the Falls. You were already 
familiar with the name and style of every hotel and 
its rates (always "American plan"). You knew in 
which one it was possible, by an ingenious and agree- 
able contrivance of mirrors, to see the Falls even 
while dining. You had heard at home discussions 
among the more nervous as to the probability of 
sleep in hostelries too near the cataract's roar. You 
were warned in advance against every wile and ex- 
tortion of the famous robber-hackmen. And you 
knew already the fact — at once piquant and intol- 
erable — that there was literally no spot affording 
even the remotest glimpse of the Falls accessible 
without the payment of an admission fee. Indeed, 
so "brought up on" Niagara was every American 
of the old stock that something very like a sense of 
a previous existence by its side must have seized 
upon him as he arrived and tightened his money- 
belt at the station. 

All this is no more. Fashions change in natural 
scenery as in everything else, and the "enterprising 
and cultivated tourist" who, according to the 

33 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

quaint 1855 Guide Book to American resorts could 
not fail to visit Niagara, might now miss it with an 
easier conscience. The village streets are no longer 
faintly fragrant of orange blossoms, the brigands and 
their hacks are under municipal control, and the 
Falls themselves are nowadays to be observed gratis 
from every kind of national or state or Canadian 
park. The expenses of the visit are now wholly 
within the bounds of reason. But the old wild 
charm of extravagance, conflict, and adventure is 
gone. Shorn of something of their traditional 
glamour, the Falls now present themselves more bald- 
ly, to borrow from the rather cynical and acidulated 
phraseology of the present writer's grandfather, as, 
"after all, only water flowing over a precipice." 
(One is reminded of Halleck's satirical poem on 
Niagara in which 

The tailor made one single note, 

"Gods, what a place to sponge a coat!") 

For the present-day tourist there is, in short, noth- 
ing left except the appalling natural beauty of the 
great cataract — that and the faintly lingering mem- 
ories of its more romantic past. 

As to the beauty of green water, rock and spray, 
and the majesty of the river's plunge into the abyss, 
nothing more can be done here than to recall for 
the reader something of his own first tremendous 

31 



FRESH WATER 



impression. There was once, back in the twenties 
of the last century, a man who fell in love with the 
Falls, a queer, vagrant, poetical English gentleman 
named Francis Abbott, who lingered long amorous 
months by their side till at last he won Niagara to 
some kind of watery bridal in the Whirlpool Rapids. 
Though the useless tragedy of his death is pitiful 
enough, yet his life and the kind of spell the great 
waters cast upon him make a pleasant whimsical 
page of local history; his ghost, clad in the pictu- 
resque fashion of that earlier day, would be now the 
best possible companion for rambles near the cata- 
ract. 

The other ghosts which one might imagine haunt- 
ing the great gorge would for the most part be en- 
gaged in various preposterous deeds of daring. Sam 
Patch — whose name now sounds like a comic in- 
vention — made some of his most famous leaps here. 
And the celebrated Blondin, if he is now remembered 
at all, is best remembered for his crossing of Niagara's 
chasm upon a tight-rope. Below, in the turmoil of 
waters, various aquatic heroes have guided the tiny 
Maid of the Mist to the very foot of the Falls, or, 
inclosed in strange harnessings, cast themselves 
into the rapids — if indeed they had not already at- 
tempted to go over the Falls in barrels or other pro- 
tective gear. 

Going over the Falls has always been tempting, 

35 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

both as a pastime and as a spectacle. Some fifteen 
to twenty thousand people once gathered to see the 
schooner Michigan slide to destruction over the 
cataract, and were much diverted by the antics 
of the animals placed on board, which in some in- 
stinctive way seemed to know their danger — such 
was the pretty, humane taste of the period. The 
Niagara River, though short, is a stream of richly 
varied life. Along its course fantastic deeds have 
been done and fantastic projects have flourished — 
one of the earliest was the famous Major Noah's 
plan for building upon Grand Island an ideal city 
for the Jewish population of the country. Its course 
may still be found to be through Utopia. 

West from Buffalo huge ships go through the in- 
land seas of summer-land, past the vine-clad islands 
of Lake Erie, the wines of which keep alive a cheap 
cult of Bacchus in the Middle West, past Put-in- 
Bay, with its brave naval memories, up the beauti- 
ful straits by Detroit, through Lake St. Clair and 
its famous "flats" dotted with fishing and shooting 
club-houses and bungalows, into the broader reaches 
of Huron, toward the gay, romantic island of Macki- 
nac, where one may easily recapture something of 
the atmosphere of Indians, fur-traders, and the old 
French missionaries and voyageurs, or, if one prefers, 
sit comfortably in a hotel rocking-chair and see 
the whole summer pleasure traffic of this north- 



FRESH WATER 



western world go by along the cross-roads of the 
Lakes. 

From Mackinac — Michilimackinac (it is pleasant 
sometimes to give it its full title) — you may choose 
to go on to that great upper lake, Superior, deep 
reservoir of waters, or south along Michigan to the 
smoky metropolis of the West. It is a huge fresh- 
water world of vacation idlers, popular indeed with- 
out being exactly fashionable or famous. Few peo- 
ple, for example, would name the lower peninsula 
of Michigan as one of the great holiday regions of 
the land. Yet, with gentle sand beaches behind which 
lie peach - orchards, it represents for a whole mid- 
western and southwestern people a cheap and ac- 
cessible shore to which they flock by thousands. 
Even Chicago itself, little as it might suggest itself 
to most of us as a summer resort, has its own clien- 
tele from the South and Southwest who establish 
themselves in suburban hotels by the lake's edge 
and give themselves up alternately to town pleas- 
ures and the magic of blue waters. 

Below Niagara and past Ontario the waters of 
the Lakes sweep into the most lordly of American 
rivers, the St. Lawrence, at whose beginning is scat- 
tered the lovely archipelago of the Thousand Islands, 
a labyrinth of clear channels upon which skiffs float 
and brisk motor-boats are always dashing on their 
way toward remoter fishing -grounds and picnic 

37 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

lunches. The island region is not really wild, still 
it has a pretty semblance of the wilderness. But its 
chief charm is probably that it seems to offer so 
freely fulfilment of one of childhood's dreams, a 
dream which does not fade with age, that of living 
proudly upon a small island of one's very own. 
There is something quite unreasonably attractive 
about the crowded islets around Alexandria Bay, the 
capital of the archipelago, where so many gentle- 
men — doubtless in ordinary life quite ordinary fel- 
lows — sit monarchs of their own domain. And if 
you cannot yourself be a king, it is something to be 
an envious tourist outside the royal gates. 

The envious tourist generally floats away down 
the St. Lawrence, shoots the rapids, and finds him- 
self, before he knows it, in Montreal and Quebec, in 
that foreign America which is one of the»pleasantest 
new discoveries of the holiday-maker. The main 
St. Lawrence route is, of course, an old and beaten 
track, if one may put it that way. But the enter- 
prising and adventurous now bring in tales of tiny 
villages of an older world which have for centuries 
slept in summer sun and winter frost along that 
lower course of the great river, doux pays de France 
such as it is now hard to find in that real France 
across the sea. Campers and sportsmen push their 
way north from the St. Lawrence toward the iron 
coast of Labrador. Farther east from the Maine 



FRESH WATER 



frontier we have begun to overrun the fair Acadian 
land, to reach the proud mihtary and naval post of 
Halifax, and, beyond, the historic island of Cape 
Breton and remotest Newfoundland, famous for 
fish and game and for that amazing port and claret 
which, so legend has it, still lie in the cellars of St. 
John's. One of the pleasantest of the facts of the 
revised geography is that the United States is bound- 
ed on the north by England and France, as it is on 
the south by Spain. 

The possession of the greatest lakes has not pre- 
vented us from making the most of the smallest. 
One of these tiny patches of water with which the 
writer made friends as a boy had even then under- 
gone a delightful and significant change of name. 
It had started as the Little Pond — there was some- 
where in the county a Big Pond, now dried up. 
Then, as its position by the new railroad gave it 
added importance, it became just The Pond. As 
such it sustained a few rowboats and was the 
occasional resort of rural lovers; it advanced to 
being Geauga Pond. And finally, when it became 
the favorite goal of excursionists from the city, it 
proudly called itself Geauga Lake, and seemed to 
vie with the neighboring Erie. Its history is doubt- 
less that of innumerable insignificant pond-holes 
all over the country — and with them as with it 
everything was owed to that great national institu- 

4 39 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

tion, the Sunday-school picnic. To satisfy the in- 
creasing needs of Sunday-schools, the land was in 
those mid-decades of the century explored and 
opened up, and in the process millions of the chil- 
dren of the city got their first lesson in the beauties 
of the countryside. Do Sunday-school picnics still 
give the same fine, careless rapture as of old, one won- 
ders, or are town children nowadays too familiar 
with rural joys? There was the delicious early- 
morning start in a crowded, dirty, hot train. Then 
the boating, the bathing, the open-air gorge at mid- 
day; in the afternoon the adventurous exploration 
of wild woods and dangerous dells already perfectly 
well known from last year's picnic, and at last the 
exhausting return in a hotter, dirtier train. ^Vhat 
now seems incredible discomfort attended this first 
opening of the window upon woodland and lake and 
river, but then the child forgave everything — even 
Sunday-school itself — for the sake of the green view 
disclosed. 

The picnic is not only one of the greatest, but one 
of the most American of our institutions; there 
might be a whole literature on it in its various 
forms, from Sunday-school to Knights of Pythias 
and Liederkranz or Schiitzenfest. At this moment, 
however, the writer's impulse is to set down a para- 
graph or two about the Pioneer Picnic, once a regu- 
lar summer event through the Middle West, now, 

40 



FRESH WATER 



alas! probably gone like the pioneers themselves. 
It makes astonishingly vivid the country's youth to 
realize how short a time back the "first settlers" 
themselves were still alive, the men and women 
who had subdued the wilderness of Ohio, Indiana, 
and Illinois, and now in a green old age could sit 
upon a platform and listen to a later generation's 
oratory in their praise. Even twenty-five years ago 
every one west of the Alleghanies was still in amaz- 
ing contact with the very beginnings of history — 
that he was once driven to a Pioneer Picnic behind 
oxen (the ox-span and a patriarchal and authentic 
early-settler grandfather both intentionally reminis- 
cent of days gone by) seems to the writer now an 
episode incredibly romantic and remote, worth the 
attention of serious historians. Picnics are doubt- 
less passing, along with other simpler last-century 
pleasures, but in groves and by absurd small lakes 
the pleasant memory of them still lingers. 

There are larger lakes, too, old favorites with 
the vacationist whose very names, Champlain, 
George, and Chautauqua, it is pleasant to set down. 
Chautauqua is now a generic term in the language — 
any town may, so the advertisements say, have "a 
Chautauqua" for a week — a lightning cartoonist, 
a male quartet, a grand-opera singer who never 
sang in grand opera, a humorous lecturing clergy- 
man, and perhaps somebody from Washington are 

41 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

all that is needed. But this concoction of unamus- 
ing amusement and uneducating education is an un- 
fair sample of the draught from the original Pierian 
spring in western New York. It is true that there, 
too, such hilarious delights exist, but there is also a 
fairly serious dose of solid education to be imbibed, 
for Chautauqua does not forget that it calls itself a 
university. The Puritan conscience has always 
found it hard to take its pleasure straight. It is 
great fun to go to Chautauqua, and to live in one of 
the thousand minute hutches called cottages. There 
is excellent boating and bathing, and there are 
pretty girls. But the best of it all is that flirtation 
is somehow sanctified if she attends the same 
lecture course with you, and even sentimental cher- 
ishing of her handkerchief next your heart is made 
permissible if with it she and several thousand other 
blameless maidens have administered the "Chau- 
tauqua salute" to William Jennings Bryan. Chau- 
tauqua, indeed, is a world of contradictions; there 
the school-teacher is no longer a school-teacher, just 
as education is no longer education, nor pleasure 
pleasure. They even say now that Chautauqua is 
no longer Chautauqua, but such views will receive 
no encouragement here. 

Rivers we possess in such abundance that we 
scarcely know them. The Hudson, of course, bears 
daily and nightly thousands through its richly culti- 

42 



FRESH WATER 



vated historic landscapes, past the really thrilling 
beauty of West Point. But who goes down the Vir- 
ginian James, by the crumbling mansions of our first 
aristocracy, or visits a hundred lovely forgotten 
streams? The exploration of America is but just 
begun. It is still for so many of us the wilderness. 
The way in which we try to bring the simple exist- 
ence of the wilderness to the very gates of the great 
cities is, in fact, one of our most engaging American 
traits. Only across the Hudson from the metropolis 
itself the stroller upon the Riverside Drive can see, 
under the shadow of the great cliffs of the Palisades, 
small white tents where imaginative youth is leading 
the life of Indian and trapper under a sky rosy at 
night with the city's lights. Camps are fun even if 
the opportunities for sport are only those afforded 
by sunfish and mud - turtles and water - lilies. A 
pleasant last summer's memory is of a small lake 
steamer touching at such a settlement, named after 
the implacable and violent Iroquois, where dozens 
of harmless boys in khaki crowded the dock, calling 
out to the city-dwellers on the decks with cheerful 
irony, "Taxi! Taxi!" and, "This way to the Sub- 
way!" 

Nothing is more grateful than the evidences of 
the simplicity that is still left in the land. It is 
pleasant to think that even the modern school-boy 
occasionally spends the summer as a "hired man" 

43 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

upon his uncle's farm, and that impecunious col- 
legians still serve as waiters or even porters at un- 
pretentious fresh-water hotels. (There was one once 
who gravely announced himself, in answer to an in- 
quiry of a boy at his table, as "Mr. Potts," and as 
*'Mr. Potts" was addressed during a whole summer. 
Since there can be no doubt that he was crowned 
with laurels at graduation, and is now the leading 
citizen of his community, this opportunity is seized 
to send him a friendly greeting across the years.) 
We talk much nowadays about the return to the 
land — but the truth is that we have not been away 
from it long. Grandfather or great-grandfather, 
if he was American, was almost surely on a farm, 
by some rippling shallow river or some clear small 
lake. We are not really "city folks." Our home- 
coming to the country is still easy, and in a simple 
two weeks' holiday we can drink of the very cup 
of rural magic. 

The return to the American country has meant 
the rise of the American country house; it only 
becomes us at once modestly to admit that it has 
risen pretty high. And since philosophy is to be 
extracted, not only from the simple life, but from 
the more complicated domestic existence of the fash- 
ionable, country-house life deserves study, by pref- 
erence in the regions near the metropolis where its 

conditions are what one might call most aggravated. 

u 



FRESH WATER 



A notable point of such existence is that it is by 
no means modeled upon European customs. We 
are more patriotic than we think. Nothing, for 
example, has ever dislodged our lovely native cock- 
tail from its position as the corner-stone of national 
hospitality. And nothing in the habits of the Eng- 
lish country gentleman or the Continental nobleman 
could furnish just the blend of comfort and con- 
fusion in which our rural life goes on. We have 
grasped the fact which lies at the very heart of 
luxury — that it does not consist in sumptuous build- 
ings nor lavish equipment, but rather in being able 
to do what you want when you want to. An ideal 
day, for example, in the life of a fashionable Long 
Island lady is when she invites guests to lunch, for- 
gets them, proposes herself to another house for food, 
and en route for it encounters a pleasanter invitation, 
and takes that — of course, sending no word to her 
hostess and leaving her own guests to a meal im- 
provised by her somewhat astonished cook. 

The two chief aids to the delightful disorganiza- 
tion which now distinguishes the highest fashion 
have been the motor-car and the telephone. The 
former will take you anywhere in a jiffy, and the 
latter will make or break an engagement for you in 
less time. If your house guests begin to bore you — 
or themselves — of an afternoon, it is delightful to 
telephone to a neighbor and suggest that you will 

45 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

bring them all over to dine. And it is equally de- 
licious to decide at a quarter before eight that it 
would be pleasanter to dine at home and to tele- 
phone to that effect. Such simple perturbations 
are, as it were, within the reach of the meanest of 
God's millionaire creatures, while in benighted 
Europe — if one can trust reports — guests quite com- 
monly expect to eat all their meals in the house in 
which they are stopping. How invigorating, by 
contrast, is the visiting of a modern young New- 
Yorker, who may quite conceivably have made his 
own arrangements before coming, and will be solici- 
tously asked by his hostess, on arrival, if he is free 
for any meals at home during his stay. 

We simple folk may inquire how housekeeping is 
possible under such circumstances, what the monthly 
bills are, and what proportion of the servants retire 
to the peace of an insane-asylum at the season's end. 
It is really all easy enough, so they say, if you are 
foolish enough to want to do it. One gentleman 
begged of his wife just this one favor — that dinner 
for at least twelve should be cooked and ready to 
serve every evening at eight in his country house. 
Sometimes he might come out with guests and some- 
times, he admitted, he might be detained in town 
and leave his wife to dine off tea and toast upon a 
bedroom tray. But to feel sure that there would 
always be dinner if he wanted it was the only way 

46 



FRESH WATER 



he knew of getting any comfort out of his money 
or his country house. Doubtless if you cook plenty 
of food and always expect to add or subtract a few 
places at the table just as the soup is coming up it 
grows easy enough. One may celebrate here the 
most perfect of all butlers who could always in the 
hall delay the unexpected guest (invited, of course, 
but just forgotten) who arrived after dinner had 
begun, until his place was hurriedly laid, so that the 
hostess in the dining-room could gracefully murmur 
something about knowing that he wouldn't have 
wanted them to wait for him. 

Guests in this new country life must, of course, 
do their share. They fetch their own motors, for, 
although the host does his best, no one with only 
five or six cars can really make his guests comfort- 
able. They bring their own maids and valets, it 
goes without saying, and one host, encountering an 
unfamiliar man-servant in the hall, is said to have 
been told that the stranger was one of the valets' 
valets! Everything, you see, is done to make every 
one at home. One lady, when she comes for longer 
than a week-end, brings her own cook and butler in 
addition to her maid and chauffeur. This is really 
sensible, for if you have any special breakfast fads 
or any health regime (the lovely lady in question 
lives almost entirely upon noodles) it is tiresome to 
have your food prepared by your friends' incom- 

47 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

petent chefs. Of course, if you send your hostess 
your diet list ahead it is easier — many people find 
it worth while to telephone a menu even for a single 
meal. A great deal, of course, can be managed with 
the modern vacuum bottles and canisters — one of 
the queens of society is said to arrive with an es- 
pecially designed silver-gilt dinner-pail containing 
boiled rice, dried toast, Bulgarian sour milk, and 
other food requisites. 

Such precautions to insure your own comfort 
while visiting are, it appears, not merely permitted, 
but almost expected in the highest circles. There 
remains, however, a considerable experimental 
region where ultra-luxurious and fashionable women 
are still working to reorganize country life on 
more rational lines. Some of these ladies, for ex- 
ample, arrive with a trunk of their own bed linen, 
their pillows and their bath-room towels, an obvious 
step, one would say, nearer perfect comfort for the 
guest. Yet queer reactionary people are found who 
say that this is not a compliment to the hostess; that 
it is, in fact, distinctly the opposite. Pioneers and 
martyrs for any cause have always met such opposi- 
tion. Even though one feels it unnecessary, one 
would like here to encourage these devoted women 
at their work of civilization. If America in the 
twentieth century could really make visiting in other 
people's country houses anything but extreme physi- 

48 



FRESH WATER 



cal agony, she would have made a historic contribu- 
tion to the history of the race, would really have 
conquered the social, as she did earlier the physical 
wilderness. 

As the country house rose, as it, in short, became 
more of a hotel, it was said that the country hotel 
fell, almost went out of existence. Here again the 
philosopher must distinguish between the physical 
and spiritual — meaning, of course, the social — as- 
pects of the question. The hotel remains in exist- 
ence, it has increased in numbers, and it has been 
decorated and plumbed and grill-roomed out of all 
likeness to its predecessors. But it is true that it 
has ceased to exist as a social arena, as an institu- 
tion which supplied not only board and lodging, but 
new friends, sweethearts, and wives as well. If to 
latter-day satirists of American society like Mr. 
Henry James and Mrs. Wharton the hotel still seems 
an enormous feature of the social landscape, how 
much more did it fill the field of vision for the nine- 
teenth-century observer. N. P. Willis spoke smartly 
of all American summer hotels as having "too much 
paint, portico, parlor, piano, and pretension," and his 
phrase will even now recreate for the imaginative 
the agreeable publicity of those days. In some skit 
of 1851 the same blithe writer proposed some codifi- 
cation of the "rules for scraping acquaintance," 
since it was admitted by all that this was the real 

49 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

object of hotel existence. It was the real object 
of such existence till a much later period. The best 
part of your summer holiday used to be your emer- 
gence from an accustomed social groove. You 
chose a resort where nature smiled and "nice people" 
gathered. These latter, you assumed as a matter 
of course, would smile too, after they had subjected 
you to a few days of discreet examination. There 
was, in fact, Willis's desired code of scraping ac- 
quaintance — you did it through interest in a dog or 
a child, or you spoke as together you consulted the 
thermometer or examined the hotel register. Al- 
most immediately you exchanged verbally certifi- 
cates of social authenticity, dwelling upon your 
happy relations with Mrs. Livingstone Jones, the 
leader of fashion in your own home town, and deli- 
cately insinuating the hope that your new friend's 
situation as regards Mrs. Snooks, analogously situ- 
ated upon her native heath, was equally felicitous. 
If, in addition, you could discover that when passing 
through New York you had both stopped (vulgarly 
"put up") at hotels of notable expensiveness, the 
trick was done — the hotel one stayed at in the 
metropolis was a much-trusted social indication in 
those days. 

"Sociability" is, of course, a quality hard to kill, 
but the ideal of the ordinary hotel nowadays would 
not seem to extend beyond "armed neutrality" be- 

50 



i^ 



FRESH WATER 



tween the guests. One's interest in modern Ameri- 
can hotels has come to be interest in their equip- 
ment, the arrival of bath-rooms for human beings, 
and the disappearance of the birds' tubs in which 
the covey of vegetables used to appear at dinner. 
The negro waiter with his tray elegantly held above 
his head upon his upturned palm is going, too, our 
only American example of indigenous charm in 
those who serve us. Serve us is a phrase chosen 
advisedly, for though it would be ungallant to deny 
charm to the waitresses who fetch the pie in a 
thousand hotel dining-rooms, their mission often 
seems to instruct and to subdue rather than to 
serve. 

Hotels are barometers of all the national feelings; 
they form an exceedingly agreeable environment to 
a studious and contemplative mind. Our national 
attitude upon the temperance question is, to choose 
but one example, accurately mirrored in hotel cus- 
toms. In prohibition states the preprandial move- 
ment of bell-boys bearing cocktails to the various 
bedrooms is a delightful example of our making 
laws and then promptly teaching the young idea 
how to break them. Even in fully licensed premises 
we have an amazing way of making all drinking 
illicit and mysterious. When, last summer, a modest 
request for beer caused the black waiter to bend 
significantly over the writer's shoulder and mutter, 

51 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

darkly, "Ah, sir, I reckon you want something from 
down-stairs," it was as if the Pit suddenly yawned 
by the table's side. Whether such sinister implica- 
tions do not render the wine-cup more alluring is a 
question to be debated. A traveling Englishman 
heard a story in one of the prohibition states which 
he would probably think evidence upon this point — 
of a hotel there which had snakes trained to bite 
the guests whenever the latter wished to make a 
drink of whisky absolutely necessary. 

We do our best, do we not, to make every one at 
home in the American country.'^ 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 



I 



Ill 

SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

TO pursue pleasure while you pretend to hunt 
health is one of the oldest and happiest subter- 
fuges of the holiday-maker. No one needs so much 
distraction as an invalid. And nothing is so easy, if 
you need distraction, as to be an invalid. It has al- 
ways seemed that the most agreeably dissipated were 
the soonest in need of health, and that folly and 
fashion were the first to require fresh strength. 
Health resorts have from time immemorial been 
notably pleasant places. 

"Mineral springs," especially, have profited by 
this very human tendency. It is the pomp and 
glitter of Bath, of Spa, of Homburg, of Ems, of 
Baden-Baden, of Aix-les-Bains upon the older con- 
tinent which comes most easily to the mind, not the 
virtues of their healing waters. And to-day, if 
properly medicated fountains could only be induced 
to gush forth from Monte Carlo's lovely rock by 
the blue Mediterranean, or from Trouville-Deau- 

ville's tawny sands upon that emerald coast of Nor- 
5 55 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

mandy, it is unquestionable that their value for 
health would be almost the greatest in Europe. 

This tradition of pleasure-seeking has enlivened 
more centuries than our own and more continents 
than Europe. Here in America, as the turmoil of 
the Revolutionary War died down and life came 
again to have a softer aspect, people began, in the 
pleasant manner that had come down from the 
eighteenth century, to "take the waters." For 
more than a half-century the history of the White 
Sulphur Springs and of Saratoga was the history of 
the country — a long, picturesque, romantic chapter 
of our national life, mellow now with age and fra- 
grant with memories. 

It is a chapter particularly interesting and perti- 
nent to-day, when fashion's pendulum, with its long, 
sure swing is again making it the mode to travel 
"to the springs." In the peaceful green valleys of 
Virginia they are building extravagantly luxurious 
hotels and bathing establishments, while on the 
pleasant green turf of Saratoga they have again set 
the horses racing. Luxury and pleasure are, of 
course, never out of fashion; what is to be noted is 
the present tremendous vogue of health. It may 
be because all gowns are so unreticent nowadays, or 
because all ladies, even old ones, are so young — in 
any case, red meat and rich sauces, champagne and 
burgundy are gradually disappearing from the 

56 




/^- 



THE PENDULUM OF FASHION' HAS SWUNG BACK TO WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

highest and gayest tables. There are fashionable 
seasons of the year when nobody who is anybody 
eats more than a slice of the breast of chicken and 
a fresh green pea, or drinks more than a cool cup of 
water from the spring. Possibly on the principle 
of no cross, no crown, some trifling ailment has again 
become absolutely essential to social position — if 
not an ailment of your own, then some one else's. 
Indeed, just as it used to be the best style to take a 
child along as an excuse for going to the circus, so 
perhaps the pleasantest way to visit a modern 
watering-place is for the purpose of boiling the 
rheumatism out of an elderly relative. To tuck 
such an invalid safely into bed and out of harm's 
way before going to the card-table or the ball-room 
makes you feel what a blessing to others ill health, 
rightly treated, may become. 

In the old days, one twinge of the gout in 'pater- 
familias* toe sufficed to start a whole caravan to the 
springs. In those times it was the habit of many 
Southern gentlemen to own their "cottages," gen- 
erally called simply "cabins," at their favorite cure 
in the Virginia mountain country. It was a fash- 
ion followed, if not set, by Mr. Washington; as late 
as 1842 the foundations of his cabin were shown 
to visitors in Berkeley Springs. Berkeley is unknown 
to most of us now, and we may imagine it sleeping 
quietly in the sun. But until very recently, at least, 

57 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

gentlemen of Maryland and Virginia followed Mr. 
Washington's example at other places — only this 
year the writer heard a Baltimore negress of the old 
regime boasting of the number of servants "her 
family" always "carried" to "the springs." 

It is pleasant to think of them driving to the 
watering-places in the old days. "M. Pencil" — 
an agreeable writer with an agreeable pseudonym — 
in 1839 dangled before his readers' eyes the hope 
that the railroad would soon come near enough to 
the Greenbriar White Sulphur — the famous "Old 
White" — to bring the springs within three days of 
New York; but he offered philosophical consolation 
— in case the railroad project failed — by reminding 
them that twenty years earlier, in 1819, the journey 
had taken a month. 

Such journeys, however, daunted no one. The 
same "M. Pencil" estimated that in the preceding 
summer, that of 1838, over six thousand people had 
visited the Western Virginia springs. Small won- 
der, since there were so many of these pleasant 
fountains! There were the White Sulphur, the Red 
Sulphur, the Salt Sulphur, the Blue Sulphur, and the 
Gray Sulphur; the Rockbridge Alum, the Bath 
Alum, and the Jordan Alum; the Hot, the Warm, 
and the Healing; the Sweet, the Old Sweet, and the 
Chalybeate; and numerous others, some unrecorded, 
some just forgotten; and to all these springs there 

58 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

came, on horseback or by coach, the bhthe, gay 
aristocracy of that early day. 

The imaginative traveler, even now, goes through 
western Virginia in a cloud of memories. The 
through vestibuled trains dash on to the Hot and 
to the Greenbriar Wliite, to which, of course, our 
traveler must inevitably repair. But he can still, 
if he chooses, travel on horseback to many of the 
lovely old-fashioned springs. It is romantic coun- 
try. A certain Paulding in a leisurely old volume 
of Letters from the South says of it, "Boys in these 
mountains are all born poets," and then adds, 
quaintly, "But they run around in the sun till their 
brains dry up." Let the traveler protect his head 
and see if he can for the moment be the poet. Let 
him see if he can get his morning meal where they 
always used to breakfast in the old days on their 
way to the Hot Springs or the Old White — at "Cal- 
laghan's," immortalized by the author of Westward 
Ho! Let him arrive at night, as he easily may, at 
some quiet, crumbling hotel along the long verandas 
and the gusty corridors of which ghosts must wan- 
der, where under the rickety spring-house they must 
on moonlight nights jest and make love as of old. 
In such places the guests still seem perpetually to 
swing to and fro in rocking-chairs, while troops of 
amiable, careless, ill-trained black servants, living 
in whitewashed quarters near by, occasionally do 

59 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

their bidding. There is dinner in the early after- 
noon, at about two; and in some hotels by his place 
at table the guest still finds his name upon a card, 
just as did Mr. Washington and Mr. Jefferson. 
There is a tea at night, mostly hot bread and the 
stewed fruit which, under the name of compote and 
at ruinous prices, is so popular at all the most fash- 
ionable and most modern European cures. If, called 
mere "sauce," it seems still to leave the bill of fare 
a meager one, the plea of invalidism, firmly advanced, 
and accompanied by a physician's certificate, will 
ordinarily produce a supplementary egg. The reg- 
imen is simple, but happily the prices are modest, 
and life in such a sunny half-forgotten corner of an 
older world may be very delightful. 

There, it will be found, traditions still survive, 
and "M. Pencil's" quaint advice to visitors — to 
take a volume of Charles Lamb along for light sum- 
mer reading — seems not altogether preposterous. 
The society in such places is good-natured, well-bred, 
and idle, inclined to prefer Bourbon whisky to the 
water from the spring, and apt to know a good poker 
hand when it sees one. The young ladies are viva- 
cious and not disinclined to accept the addresses of 
the young gentlemen — there are, in fact, an enor- 
mous number of engagements arranged, quite out of 
proportion to the number of marriages resulting 
therefrom. There is a vast amount of gay light 

60 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

talk always going on along the verandas, and no 
one really very bitterly minds if either the golf- 
course or the tennis-court is in such bad condition 
as to be practically useless. In the old days, nine- 
pins on the green, and quoits, were the accustomed 
sports, and something of the agreeable unathletic 
atmosphere of those times still lingers. 

The South is full of such places, to which North- 
erners rarely go. That the writer, as a boy, spent 
summers at one of them, and learned to swim in a 
great, warm, sulphurous pool, taught by an ancient 
negro who seemed to have taught Mr. Washington 
and Mr. Jefferson, and to be likely to teach Presi- 
dents still unborn, are facts of no importance to the 
reader, but they are, nevertheless, set down with 
pride. Summer in the South, whether at the springs 
or merely in the mountains, might be, to the senti- 
mental holiday-maker, a delightfully romantic ex- 
perience. Economical, too. For example, the ram- 
shackle North Carolina mountain hotels which 
shelter that proud, impoverished Charlestonian aris- 
tocracy have a tradition of cheap rates almost in- 
credible farther North. (It must be remembered, 
of course, that in Charleston itself it is ostentatious 
and bad style for the visitor with connections in 
the local society to go either to a hotel or to the 
more expensive of the two boarding-houses. For 
those unable, while in Paris, to penetrate the Fau- 

61 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

bourg St.-Germain, it might be interesting to make 
a similar attempt at home in some remote Caro- 
linian mountain valley.) 

Presidents of the United States have perhaps been 
mentioned rather familiarly in connection with these 
Virginia springs, but great people, even Presidents, 
were no strangers — especially at the Old White, 
where the visitors one morning saw Mr. Van Buren 
arrive on horseback, unannounced and unattended 
save by his son. Foreigners of distinction almost 
invariably made their pilgrimage to the most fa- 
mous Southern spa, and wrote in many musty and 
forgotten books pleasant descriptions of its life and 
gaiety. 

Something of that life and gaiety it would be 
pleasant to recapture, for a moment, upon this page. 
There was always a great deal of dancing at the Old 
White — pven morning "hops" existed there long 
before the present craze brought daylight dancing 
into general fashion. It sounds quaint to read in 
the old memoirs that Floridian families introduced 
and made popular a Spanish dance — doubtless the 
tango of its day. Other diversions seem less defi- 
nitely contemporaneous. It was a favorite excursion 
to drive to Lewisburg when the court was sitting 
there, listen to a speech at the bar by some well- 
known lawyer, dine, and return to the springs. It 
suggests the days when politics and the law were 

62 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

more essential parts of the community's social life 
than they are now. There was always, one way or 
another, plenty of amusement at the springs, but, 
after all, the one chief diversion was flirtation, usu- 
ally followed by an honorable matrimonial engage- 
ment. 

What the French term le hon motif reigned su- 
preme. It was the era of the young girl; and the 
Old White, though frisky, was no place for frisky 
matrons. Marriage was the one object of the sum- 
mer. Even as late as the seventies or eighties it 
was said that purses were made up in little Southern 
towns to send likely maids or youths to the mar- 
riage mart of the Old White. The wood walks near 
the hotel were significantly labeled Lover's Rest, 
Lover's Walk, Courtship Maze, and, finally. Accept- 
ance Way to Paradise! (Saratoga, not to be wholly 
outdone, placed in its hotel parlors a strange piece 
of furniture called a "proposal sofa.") And in the 
'30's the eligible gentlemen at the White Sulphur 
deliberately formed an association — the constitution 
of which, printed on pink paper, hung conspicuously 
in the ball-room — "The Billing, Wooing, and Cooing 
Society," a name in itself a pledge of their intentions 
such as elusive modern males would hesitate to 
give. 

Life even in mid-century days must have been 
on a tremendous scale at the Old White — a legend 

63 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

heard in childhood was that the dining-room of the 
hotel was so enormous that the waiters served on 
horseback! This old hotel has been replaced, of 
course, on a new but equally tremendous scale. 
There is French furniture now, and the bills are 
higher. There is a bathing-pool which might have 
been the pride of Rome. Something of the Old 
World atmosphere is gone, as it is gone at the Hot, 
where even as late as the eighties there was only 
a small, dilapidated, red-brick hotel intermittently 
open. But it would be wrong to regret the gallant 
way in which the old Virginian springs have again 
become the haunt of fashion. Golf and auction re- 
place the drive to Lewisburg to hear a speech, and the 
honeymoon itself has perhaps made "Courtship's 
Maze" a useless provision. But nothing can alter 
the loveliness of the landscape nor the qualities of 
the climate. And if Fashion now chooses to come 
in the spring and fall rather than in summer, it 
is quite possible that she considers two seasons 
better than one. Where else, to close the discussion, 
can a lady wear her best gowns in April or October? 
Saratoga was more famous even than the Old 
White — she was, indeed, for decades the real Queen 
of American Watering-Places. Even now during 
her racing month she welcomes a huge miscellane- 
ous horde of lovers of the horse and one-time lovers 
of the betting-ring, and during these weeks remem- 

64 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

bers the old days and fondly hopes they have come 
again. But June, July, and September are sleepy, 
sunny months, and likely to remain so until the vil- 
lage realizes that probably only as a health resort 
may it again become a resort of pleasure. But to 
achieve this end it must face the facts. No modern 
ailment will budge an inch in a hotel which is still 
lit by gas, which has no porcelain tubs, no motor- 
bus at the station, and no restaurant a la carte, with 
head waiters who have been at the best hotels in 
Paris. The matter of restaurant is particularly im- 
portant. Nothing nowadays gives such distinction 
as the inability to endure ordinary cheap cooking. 
There are very few places, even in Europe, where a 
really fashionable stomach can obtain proper nour- 
ishment. If Saratoga would only build an extrav- 
agantly expensive hostelry and announce that its 
chef was the only man in America who knew how 
to boil an egg, the tide of the best illnesses would set 
rapidly toward the Springs. 

Of course, it may still be doubted whether water 
will ever really touch the liver at a spa where there 
is no gambling-house — the balance of proof both 
here and abroad is to the contrary. This may, in- 
cidentally, be a suitable place to refer to French 
Lick, where they boil so many theatrical managers, 
leading stars, and queens of society, and to the 
Hot Springs of Arkansas, where they repair the 

63 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

high-livers of the West and Southwest; at both 
these resorts gambhng is said to be an essential 
feature of the cure. Possibly poker and auction 
privately indulged in may suffice for Saratoga. 
But its whole general tone of luxury must be con- 
siderably heightened. For example, the spring- 
houses must be done over, of course, to provide an 
agreeable promenade. The springs themselves will 
do very well as they are, but they must be pre- 
scribed by famous, expensive, and suave physicians. 
A few first-class shops — milliners, modistes, and 
jewelers — near by would greatly help the cure. 

In the mean while, till some such radiant future 
shall come, the present hotels and the sleepy town 
are delightful to the sentimental tourist. Perhaps 
nowhere else in America does what one might call 
the country's social past so clearly come before one. 
The very names of the chief hotels — ^United States, 
Grand Union, and Congress Hall (though Congress 
Hall is, alas! no more) hint at a time more vividly 
American; who now would name a smart hotel 
after Congressmen or expect to prosper among spit- 
toons, with political boots at their ease upon the 
piazza railings and the mantelpieces? 

It was President Van Buren himself who by his 
patronage and partisanship, and that of his son, 
"Prince John," raised the States to a level of fash- 
ionable equality with its older rival, the Union. 

66 




MEMBERS OF THE OLD GUARD STILL LINGER AT SARATOGA 



« 



I 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

(The Grand Union dated from 1802, Congress Hall 
from 1811, and the United States from 1823.) And 
one of the golden periods of beauty and folly at 
the Springs was the period of political corruption 
in New York State termed, quite in the Georgian 
fashion, the Albany Regency. Even later Saratoga 
felt that its prosperity depended upon politics and 
politicians. The village possesses a very char- 
acteristic American institution, a Convention Hall, 
the use of which is free to any one, from one of the 
great national parties to the "Concatenated Order 
of Hoo-Hoos," and their like. The convention or 
congress is one of our most notable modes of holiday- 
making, and Saratoga, with its vast bare hotels 
which can cope with the hordes which descend upon 
such occasions, a significant expression of our national 
Hfe. 

The hotels early in the history of the Springs ex- 
ceeded all previous standards, European or Ameri- 
can. They grew, with all the vigor and crudity of 
the new country, to preposterous dimensions. The 
Grand Union had a mile of veranda, could sleep two 
thousand and dine twelve hundred at once. And 
in this gigantic, tawdry setting politicians, operatic 
"divas" and dethroned European monarchs — to 
choose almost at random from the list of patrons — 
combined to give the queer nineteenth - century 
American note, cosmopolitanism in the backwoods, 

67 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

extravagant luxury in a lumber - camp. The ex- 
King Joseph Bonaparte frequented the United 
States. (There is a long and not very important 
local legend of his being frightened by the hotel 
cat.) Joseph wished to establish himself perma- 
nently at the Springs; only his failure to make a bar- 
gain for a tract of land there induced him instead 
to fix his seat at Bordentown. Lafayette, too, was 
at Saratoga in the twenties, and caused much excite- 
ment by "admitting to his circle" upon the hotel 
veranda the famous Madame Jumel, whose enemies 
were so bitterly accusing her of being the mistress 
of the well-hated Aaron Burr. This lady, who later 
was most certainly Mrs. Burr, was for many years a 
picturesque figure at the Springs. She lived at the 
hotel in a state of great pomp and extravagance, and 
took the tone of teaching elegance to the barbarians 
— in a day when liveried servants and two men on 
the box were almost unknown even in New York 
this was not difficult. But glittering with jewels 
and clad in Parisian gowns though she was, she 
lived a little like an outcast — there is a tragic-comic 
story of a famous local character, a negro named 
Tom Camel, dressing himself up to burlesque "Burr's 
mistress," with all her airs and graces, and being 
driven in much state behind her as she went forth 
for her daily carriage exercise — to the delight of 
Saratoga. There were literary celebrities, too, and 

68 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

indeed just the right celebrities — Washington Irving 
for many seasons at the United States, and Cooper 
in 1828. And always politicians, rich merchants, and 
lovely ladies without number. 

In 1830 a scornful writer, prejudiced in favor of 
the Virginia springs, asserted that since the com- 
pletion of the railroad Saratoga was no longer fash- 
ionable, since you could go there from New York in 
a day and for five dollars. Saratoga, to tell the 
truth, was never limited and exclusive; it was al- 
ways democratically good-natured and yet vulgarly 
tawdry and extravagant. It was the classic re- 
proach of visiting foreigners that its ladies wore 
diamond earrings in the daytime and promenaded 
its sidewalks in decolletee gowns. (How much in 
fashion the poor dears would now be!) But it is 
to be noted that the visiting foreigners as well as 
the natives had a very good time. In fact, just 
that pleasant kind of welter of all the classes is 
what in America we have always done so well; we 
would be well advised to be proud of it. 

Memories of these crowded times still linger at 
the Springs. To the imaginative traveler Saratoga, 
even in her present desolate days, is still the Queen 
of American Watering-Places. If, at least in this 
present article, the writer seems to dwell, perhaps 
excessively, upon the historic side of American holi- 
days, and so upon Saratoga as the greatest existing 

69 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

record of our national pleasures, it is because he is 
so firmly convinced that we neglect the romantic 
associations of our own past, and could, if we would, 
make visiting our own cfountry a deeper, richer ex- 
perience. 

The village of Saratoga itself, not considering the 
hotels, is an agreeable historic page. The "cottages" 
give one a survey of our bad architecture for fifty 
years. And the surrounding grounds are almost the 
only existing examples of an earlier tradition of 
American gardening, when the chief desideratum 
was a smooth green lawn, "like velvet," and there 
was no nonsense about pergolas, Italian statuettes, 
and garden furniture — a few nice zinc dogs and 
stags and some iron benches being thought quite 
sufficient. But Saratoga's hotels are more signifi- 
cant than its cottages. 

Along the great verandas, along those Intermina- 
ble corridors, there still creep wearily a few habitual 
old ghosts. They will die some day, this old guard, 
but till then they will never surrender their summer 
at the Springs. The men, one guesses, were perhaps 
friends of Roscoe Conkling or of James G. Blaine; 
or perhaps, instead, they could give you gossip of 
the Tweed Ring. Again, they might like to talk of 
the merchant prince, A. T. Stewart, who once owned 
the Grand Union. The ladies' gossip would be 
lighter — of frocks and famous beauties of the past. 

70 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

And they themselves, though they may use ear- 
trumpets now, have by no means renounced ele- 
gance; but their finery is of the days when gentle- 
men admired a figure and a pretty woman had a 
waist. It is pleasant to see them in the sweet, fool- 
ish old Victorian parlors of the hotels, all gilt furni- 
ture and pale-blue satin. It is like taking up a 
faded yellow volume of Godey^s Lady's Book and read- 
ing again one of its dashing novels of gallantry and 
fashion at Saratoga. Those were indeed the brave 
days of flowered carpets, of romance, and of pink 
champagne. Can nineteenth-century Europe show 
any braver .^^ 

The writer's net has had to be thrown pretty wide 
over the subject of American holidays; it is perhaps 
partly by chance that mountains come in with min- 
eral springs. Geographically, they are to some ex- 
tent allied, but socially they are of a different stripe, 
at once more rural and more modern. At the time 
when America began to "take the waters" and to 
indulge in sea-bathing, Chateaubriand's eighteenth- 
century view of mountains — that they were horrid 
features of the landscape, only to be viewed from a 
distance — was doubtless still prevalent. The White 
Mountains were actually scaled in 1642, when one 
Derby Field brought back stories of what he quaint- 
ly called the Muscovy Glass (isinglass) upon the 
6 71 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

modestly named White Hill, now Mt. Washington. 
But for a long time tourists scarcely ventured there. 
Mountaineering was considered a singularly dash- 
ing recreation; the manager of one of the oldest 
of the White Mountain hotels wrote of his hostelry 
as the favorite resort of "accomplished tourists." 
For female visitors climbing was even of almost 
doubtful gentility. The Misses Austin of Ports- 
mouth, who visited Mt. Washington in 1821, were 
daring innovators. Even as late as the late fifties 
a hotel proprietor endeavored to still any possible 
terror in gentle breasts by advertising that his local 
mountain, "Pemigewasset," could be easily as- 
cended by ladies. Nowadays every summit of these 
White and Franconia hills is scaled by rosy-cheeked 
girls in sweaters, and the terrifying mountains have 
become almost domestic pets. Even motor-cars 
climb to the very wind-swept summit of New Eng- 
land; and in the valleys below thousands of these 
machines dash constantly to and fro upon "Ideal" 
and other tours. It is greatly to the credit of the 
air that, in spite of their dust, it remains clear and 
cool and the chosen medium in which the hay-fever 
sufferer may hope to breathe. 

The White Mountains are devoted to sports. 
Yet so crowded and elegant do they become in the 
height of the season that symphony orchestras play 
upon their lawns and in their gardens, and elegant 

72 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

ladies trail elaborate gowns along their hotel corri- 
dors. The poised pen hesitates suspended before 
such a wealth of subjects. But the hay-fever vic- 
tims, and above all their annual Hay-fever Congress, 
are perhaps the most characteristic phenomena of 
all the mountain region. The delegates are indeed 
"accomplished tourists," to borrow the last century's 
phrase. Bound together by a universal detestation 
of a certain odious plant called ragweed, they are 
still at variance concerning other vegetable pests, 
and bring to the congress's experience meetings a 
varied and picturesque testimony. It makes an 
outing at once admirable and agreeable. Altruism 
is satisfied, for they wish well by the mucous mem- 
branes of the whole world; and social cravings are 
satisfied in the intervals when they are at their 
ease in a comparatively pollenless air — it is indeed 
an ideal and sneezeless holiday. 

The writer has no wish in this article to arrange 
mountains as in a geographical catalogue. It is pre- 
ferred, if possible, to name them only as symbolizing 
some feature of our national vacation life. The 
Catskills, for example, so near the metropolis that 
they were early tamed and taught to eat from the 
hand, are mentioned merely that they may suggest 
at once to the mind the farm boarding-house, the 
straw ride, the buckboard, the dark and dangerous 
dry-goods store clerk fluttering the maiden dove- 

73 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

cotes over Sunday — all the simple, old-fashioned 
pleasures of the countryside. This is not the wild 
west of the leather hat-band and the puma or 
mountain-lion, nor the wilderness of the Adirondacks, 
where the camp-valet has your bath drawn and gets 
you up in time to go out and trap something before 
the chef has breakfast ready. This is just the 
country, the lovely ragged American country gay 
with goldenrod and pretty girls, devoted to our 
own American country life unchanged by European 
models. 

There is a deal of talk about how we nowadays 
live in the country like the English country gentle- 
man. We don't; that is the truth of it — not even 
those who are most securely in society. To the 
writer the most significant feature of the accounts 
printed not long ago of a great jewel robbery near 
a famous resort was the astonishing disclosure of 
the fact that a near neighbor, a lady of the very 
highest fashion, had been that evening "entertain- 
ing" at a "marshmallow roast"! 

Is it not better to be honest and admit that the 
real American vacation is largely devoted to candy .^^ 
From a certain favorite resort visited recently one 
brought away merely the memory of a huge trade 
done in that form of confectionery termed "kisses," 
which appeared to be the local specialty. There 
were Goldenrod Kisses, Crystal Kisses, and (doubt- 

74 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

less for those of a reprehensible looseness of life) As- 
sorted Kisses. Of these the Goldenrod appeared 
to be the favorite, for during the preceding kissing 
season the monstrous quantity of thirteen tons of 
this kind had been sold ! This is a grotesque example 
of the effect of the national sweet tooth, which in 
its milder manifestations organizes the marshmallow 
roast, the popcorn party, and the candy pull. How 
pleasantly it all hints at the farm and country life 
from which, only a generation or so back, most of 
us, of the pure American stock, derive! And how 
pleasant it would be if one could add to the list of 
indigenous summer diversions the now almost for- 
gotten husking-bee! 

Among our green mountains and river valleys 
there flourishes occasionally a special variety of the 
simple life, in which, as an archaic revival, as a kind 
of fancy-dress party, the husking-bee might exist. 
The Artistic Colony, in which the elect are segre- 
gated and live in a rarefied atmosphere and upon 
small incomes, has been described by one unkindly 
critic as a "collection of old maids painting in barns.'* 
The definition is not quite accurate, for although 
the ravages of art are perhaps always greatest nowa- 
days among the ranks of female celibates, it devas- 
tates as well the married and the male. There is 
something in the general lack of artistic quality in 
American business life, in its failure to supply that 

75 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

famous "atmosphere" in which so many people 
seem to wish to grow like orchids in a hothouse, 
which makes the refined withdrawal of any group 
of people from the vulgar turmoil seem a little self- 
conscious, to the unregenerate and unartistic even 
a little humorous. A poet on the mountainside 
lying down, deliberately and before competent wit- 
nesses, to drink in from Mother Earth her strength 
and her soul is at once a fantastic, pleasing, and 
comic sight. And there is satiric tragedy in the 
story of the gallant retired general who lived like 
a leper in the midst of one of our most famous artis- 
tic colonies because he painted his cowshed and pig- 
sty a certain crude yellow without having first taken 
the sense of the community as to the suitability of the 
unhappy color. Legends like these, though no doubt 
apocryphal, still convey something of the agreeable 
exotic flavor of this higher life. 

One should pause here, perhaps, seriously to re- 
cord and praise the gallantry of any art braving our 
stiff commercial breezes, and the real merit of any 
community deliberately fixing the standard of liv- 
ing at a reasonable and decent level. Having done 
so, one may be permitted some mild amusement at 
the resultant poses. The men of an artistic com- 
munity are supposed to abjure conventional eve- 
ning dress as a badge of servitude to philistinism; the 

neat blue flannel coat and white trousers which are 

76 




SECLUSION IS NOT ALWAYS EASILY ATTAINED 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

de rigueur serve to efface them. The women, hap- 
pily, are expected to supply the element of beauty, 
and are consequently permitted to dress in any wild, 
sweet way they will. The bead chain, the pretty 
jewel (home-made if possible) of enamel and wrought 
iron, the peasant's cap, and the loose-jQowing Algerian 
robe (is it not called "gibbah''.^*), all have their ad- 
vocates and users in these rural domains of art. 
The inspiration of one painter's art (who is his wife 
as well) wears, when traveling, a fresh gardenia 
pinned coquettishly upon a sealskin toque. A poet- 
ess has, poetically, a long necklace of amber beads, 
in each of which is literally imbedded the traditional 
fly! These things have been seen by the writer, 
qui vous parte. And he is convinced that careful 
research would enable him to make the picture 
richer and lovelier. He confesses, moreover, that it 
would be a pleasure to write for ever upon such a 
subject. 

It has been found possible, happily for many peo- 
ple, to elude art and to return to Nature without her 
disquieting presence. And since something of the 
humorous side of the Artistic Colony has been 
hinted at, it would be only fair for a moment to 
dwell upon the comic aspects of the millionaire's 
mountain retreat. This is, commonly, in the Adiron- 
dacks. And it is true that they plumb the pine 
woods so that you may have hot and cold water in 

77 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

the tents, that the caviare and the pate de fois gras 
arrive regularly, and that the champagne is unex- 
ceptionable. Luxury in a real wilderness, all within 
a night's journey of the metropolis, is of course a fan- 
tastic fairy-story kind of thing, requiring to produce it 
either Aladdin and his lamp or the modern American 
and his money. There is an artificial side to it; 
Marie Antoinette, who would unquestionably have 
been fashionable and popular in New York, would 
as unquestionably have had an Adirondack camp. 
But there is a genuine side to it as well, the deep- 
seated national love of simplicity and open air. 
Mountain pictures themselves are what cling to the 
memory after a holiday in the woods : dancing waves 
upon some small, clear lake in the morning, dark 
pines against an orange sunset sky. One recalls pic- 
nics where the canoe has been pulled up at the edge 
of some lonely, winding, sedgy river. One remembers 
dashing motor-boats and boys and pretty girls in 
country clothes, browns and yellows and crimsons, 
all the colors of our unequaled American autumn 
landscape. The clothes came from expensive shops 
in town, but for all they belong upon expensive peo- 
ple near expensive mountains in the expensive 
country. They are a natural part of the whole 
pretty scene. 

It would be pleasant to delay here, in our some- 
what rambling literary course, for a passage upon 

78 



SPRINGS AND MOUNTAINS 

country costume and for a phrase or two of self- 
congratulation upon the way we are learning to wear 
it in America. True, we have borrowed from that 
older continent, but the sweater and the Mackinaw 
coat which enliven the mountain woods and streams 
always hint at Leatherstocking and Pathfinder and 
all our native legends of trapper and Indian in the 
forest primeval. Aided, of course, by the somewhat 
exuberant taste in dress nourished in our colleges, 
we are learning not to be afraid of color, but to put 
on gold and crimson which vie with autumn's 
painted woods themselves in splendor. 

It is indeed with autumn and the turning of the 
leaf that our American mountains look their bravest 
and most beautiful, and excel in their gay garb all 
foreign mountains. In some sense they seem to 
have special claims upon the fall, which, of all seasons 
of the year, is the most nearly perfect thing the 
American climate has to offer. The tang and brill- 
iancy of our October and November air are unequaled 
in the world. What can be pleasanter anywhere 
than to retreat from the summer sea to the autumn 
hills, to see goldenrod and aster bloom, and to 
gather red apples? The mountain world is pleas- 
antly full of pumpkins and sunshine. The days are 
for horseback rides and climbs and rambles in the 
woods. The nights are for open fires and cups of 
our real vin du pays, cider. Until Thanksgiving, all 

79 



IX VACATION AMERICA 

over the land, in the Alleghanies, the Catskills, the 
Berk5hires, the Adirondacks, the "White and Green 
Mountains, and the vaster "Western ranges, happy 
people linger, postponing from day to day their 
coming back to the gay, busy, pleasant, exhausting 
town. And when Thanksgi^Tng comes have we any- 
thing for which to give greater thanks than our 
lovely American country, our own moimtains and 
cn'stal springs? 



CITY SUMMERS 



IV 

CITY SUMMERS 

THE dreadful truth about the summer is that 
most of it is, by most of us, spent in work 
rather than in play. The summer blazes through 
three splendid months, the average vacation lasts 
through three weeks, at best, and is gone. The 
holiday season, paradoxical as it may sound, is 
spent at the desk or in the workshop, and the so- 
called empty town swarms with people as the coun- 
try never does. The city summer is, indeed, the 
general fate of humankind. 

All of us have read, doubtless many of us have 
written, the articles which appear regularly in the 
newspapers upon our great cities as summer resorts — 
they are, indeed, the classics of journalism, and much 
of their philosophy must unavoidably be repeated 
here. But some of their strongest arguments have be- 
come weakened with time. Chief among them was the 
statement that only in your flat in town could you 
enjoy the real luxury of the bath; but plumbing is 
now all-pervasive. Mr. Punch, commenting upon 

83 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

us from his tin-tubbed England, says that now, of 
course, no simple summer hotel in America dreams 
of having less than two bath-rooms for each bedroom! 
So luxurious have we become, too, that fresh coun- 
try eggs, milk, and vegetables are now supplied to 
the inhabitants of the remotest rural districts. And 
disappearing, also, is that lovely traditional woman 
who, refusing to leave the town, entertained so 
pleasantly, at a ridiculously inexpensive dinner, her 
husband and all his male friends — she herself, so 
the articles always specifically stated, "fresh from a 
hot tub" and "delightfully" attired in "something 
crisp and cool." 

It is perhaps the automobile which is changing all 
this. The delightful male friends who ply her with 
their pleasant but honorable attentions can now 
easily motor to the near-by country where she lives, 
from which she comes often to town to dine at some 
summer restaurant and to do a "show" at some 
roof -garden theater. In the quaint days of the nine- 
teenth century it was eccentric — almost dishonorable 
— to be seen in town in midsummer. Do you re- 
member the legends about those families who, pre- 
tending they had gone to Long Branch or Saratoga, 
really lived in the back of the house and went out, 
furtively, only by night? Nowadays it is astonish- 
ing how many things seem to bring people up from 
the country for a night or two, and how fashionable 

84 




THE CITY SUMMER IS THE GENEK.VL FATE OF HUMANKIND 



CITY SUMMERS 



and gay such expeditions are. It is smart, too, to 
be passing through from Long Island to Newport or 
from Bar Harbor to Lenox, and to pause upon the 
wing. The people whom you see in town in August 
are nowadays extremely pleased with themselves, 
rather proud of being there. Their eyes are clear, 
and they bring to city pleasures an unbounded en- 
thusiasm. The great truth is being constantly re- 
discovered that nothing gives one such a zest for 
the town as a little time in the country. 

And the town — the great working town which 
knows little of fashion and motors and the country 
— feels the arrival of the holiday spirit, even while 
it toils. There are, after all, half-holidays and early 
closings. There are twilights prolonging the day 
and warm nights crowding the pleasure parks and 
suburban beaches. It is tacitly understood that 
labor is to take things a little easily. Mortality 
among the grandmothers of office boys is expected 
to run high during the baseball season, and no one 
begrudges the lads an extra bereavement or two 
when the championship is at stake. The town in 
summer is not merely hot — it is genial. And with 
each succeeding year it becomes pleasanter as a 
habitation. 

The time was — it is not yet so very distant — when 
the chief, almost the only, possible recreation during 
the heated spells in town was drinking soda-water. 

85 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

And this is still, perhaps, the king of city summer 
sports. A leading purveyor of such beverages bold- 
ly advertises in all the street-cars of the metropolis 
that his ice-cream soda "is as refreshing as a dip in 
the surf." There are, of course, adepts of the 
fountain who keep up their favorite recreation all 
winter. Who of us has not seen, on some bleak 
January day, half -frozen district messenger-boys 
take refuge in a drug-store and there fortify them- 
selves against the bitter cold by huge mugs of ice- 
cream soda? But the taste, though preserved in 
winter, is formed in summer. It is then that doors 
are flung wide open to the street, while glittering 
fountains, towering like fairy castles, cast their magic 
spell upon those who pass along the burning pave- 
ments. (In certain fortunate regions, where the 
tide of national civilization must be admitted to 
be rising very high, the drug-store serves its soda 
to the music of a string quartet, and, in one happy 
Southern city, to the accompaniment of a "cabaret 
show.") Let those who are approaching middle 
age remember the corner drug-store of their child- 
hood, with its modest white-marble fountain dispens- 
ing six simple syrups. Nothing better marks the 
triumphant progress of the country, the richening 
and deepening of its life, than these gorgeous modern 
sources of a thousand strange concoctions of exotic 
names and irresistible allure. 

86 



CITY SUMMERS 



There is a vast science of drinking at drug-stores 
— there should be treatises on *' sundaes" (why 
"sundaes"?) and text-books on the art of choosing 
"college ices." Yet they would become almost im- 
mediately obsolete, so constant is the flow of new 
drinks and fantastic nomenclature from the exuber- 
ant fount of our national imagination. One has 
scarcely discovered what seems the most preposter- 
ous drink yet when one finds another still more 
absurd and fantastic. When one wearies of a 
"soul kiss," one may turn to a "pineapple tempta- 
tion." 

Drinking, to the refreshment of both body and 

soul, is important in the city summer. So is eating, 

but paradoxically it is almost more important not 

to eat than to eat — ^that is to say, it is the fashion 

to eat very little. American hot weather is really 

hot, and American light eating really light. Those 

who have ever happened to be in London during 

one of those British heat waves which drive the 

thermometer up beyond sixty-five, are familiar with 

the elaborate advice given by the newspapers as to 

diet necessary in such tropical moments. Monsieur 

Adolphe of the Savoy or Monsieur Jacques of the 

Ritz is always interviewed; he always advises fruit, 

cold food, little meat, and little alcohol. He then 

submits to the reporter a characteristic light menu 

for lunch, the sort of thing he is apparently suggest- 
7 87 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

ing to apoplectic noblemen and gentlemen. It is 
usually something like this: 

Melon cantalope 

Consomme froid en tasse 

Filet de sole a la Normandie 

Chaudfroid de Poulet a la neige 

Jambon froid 

Salade de laitue 

Glace aux framboises 

Patisserie 

If you eat no more than this, says the great authority, 
and drink only perhaps a light Mosel cup with coffee 
and liqueurs to follow, you will not overheat the 
blood and will be able, if you manage to make a 
decent tea, to last comfortably till dinner. This 
"snack," if one may so term it, can be secured, so 
it appears, for not more than three or four dollars 
a head. In America most of us would be in luck if 
we got such a meal in midwinter. The problem 
really does face our mattres dliotels and head 
waiters how to make small meals and large bills 
synonymous, but the problem does not daunt them. 
There are plenty of ways, besides spending it on 
food, of making the money fly. 

Foreign cities merely provide charming summer 
restaurants in their parks and boulevards; we in 
America perform complete Aladdin- like transforma- 
tions of our winter haunts, and upon our dull, flat 



CITY SUMMERS 



roofs raise magic kiosks of pleasure. Rooms heavy 
with brocade and gold are lavishly redecorated 
with green-latticed walls, garden furniture, and 
flowers and vines swaying in the cool current from 
countless electric fans. As for roof gardens, since 
Babylon hung them above the dusky splendors of 
her ancient Broadway no miracle so lovely has 
been wrought in the hot city night. Trellises of 
flowering creepers, hedges and arbors of box and 
bay, parterres ever freshly blossoming, pools where 
nocturnal goldfish flash, fountains plashing, and 
cascades coming gaily down small, green-clad preci- 
pices, pergolas and canopies of multicolored lights, 
and the high view over the hot, brilliant streets and 
the town itself flaunting its thousand electric signs 
against the paler illumination of the stars and moon 
— such is the fantastic setting which the twentieth 
century provides for even such simple pleasures as 
a lemonade. Not, indeed, that roof-garden bever- 
ages are necessarily of this simple character — the 
Orient and the tropics are searched for strangely 
insidious, wildly named drinks — and the introduc- 
tion of one of them almost always merits at least a 
paragraph next day in the local papers. Such things 
are of public interest, for we all, when summer comes, 
do to some extent what Voltaire's Candide was ad- 
vised to do: we cultivate our roof garden. 

There is no need for the city-lover to disparage 

89 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

the country — it is well enough, even when one is 
dining in town, to think of moonlit lawns, or the 
long swash of the surf, or the lapping of some little 
lake upon its pebbly shore. But the summer town 
is for some moods pleasanter than the pleasant coun- 
try. Then the fashionable restaurant is perhaps the 
best place to catch the especial note, informal, gay, 
and elegant, of urban hot weather. 

At the entrance, guarded by a chefs assistant in 
white linen, is usually the huffet froid, a cool expanse 
(topped with ice sculpture by the greatest kitchen 
artists), upon which lie plates of strange eggs, of 
exotic fish, and of flesh and fowl masquerading in 
all kinds of jellied and truffled disguises (it is an 
international affair, this cold table — a week after 
the grouse-shooting opens on the British moors, 
these admirable birds lie waiting your patronage at 
the restaurant's door). Near by stand the suave 
head waiters, always several degrees cooler than the 
thermometer, ready to exchange the polite compli- 
ments of the season as they show you to your table. 
There is no question but that it is pleasant to sit 
under a great green-and-white-striped tent, within 
an inclosing hedge of clipped box and flowers that 
grow as they never do in rural airs, and have friendly 
aliens bring to you, exquisitely cooked, the fresh eggs 
and fish and fruit and chicken, all that spoil of the 
country which can never be secured except in town. 

90 



CITY SUMMERS 



It is pleasant to realize that by half past eight or 
nine all the fair fashionable women and all the 
brave rich men left in the desolate town will have 
drifted in for dinner. It is pleasant to be in a short 
coat, if indeed you are not in flannels. It is agree- 
able to notice that young foreign noblemen and 
other strangers of distinction who are passing through 
sometimes appear in tropical costumes of pongee. 
It is delightful to find what pretty frocks women 
find it worth while to wear, and certainly not un- 
pleasant philosophically to contemplate the diapha- 
nous version of costume which the August heats 
make possible, though perhaps not exactly neces- 
sary. It is soothing to realize that entertainments 
in roof gardens and musical comedies in artificially 
refrigerated theaters can be as well visited at half 
past nine as at any earlier hour — ^perhaps better. 
It is encouraging to remember that motor-cars and 
taxicabs exist, and that there are long roads through 
shadowy parks, and in all the surrounding country 
wayside restaurants upon the breezy verandas of 
which cooling drinks again may flow. Last, and 
perhaps best of all, it is amazingly heartening to 
know that if you like you can merely go home early 
enough to get a good night's sleep. 

Of summer theaters and "shows" in the great 
cities there is perhaps not much to be said; they are 
chiefly notable, and, indeed, to be recommended, 

91 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

according to the measure in which they lack mental 
stimulus and supply girls. That famous "tired 
business man" comes wholly into his own in the 
hot weather. In the smaller places he is subjected 
to a more strenuous discipline, for it is the season 
of stock companies which plunge headlong through 
the whole dramatic repertory and give many of 
our leading actors and actresses some slight oppor- 
tunity to learn to act, a chance denied them during 
the forty successful weeks of the winter, all spent 
in one play. Here are — at least here should be, 
according to the serious dramatic critics — the 
Theatres Frangais of our stage. 

Music, heavenly maid, should be the chief and 
loveliest ornament of the town in summer. Per- 
haps the best thing to be said for the alarmists who 
wish to increase our American army is that if they 
succeeded we should have more military bands, 
more concerts in the parks, and more musical eve- 
nings gratis. The matter might suitably be subject 
for consideration at The Hague. But even on a 
peace footing the flow of park melody is increasing 
— in most of our larger cities there are many band 
concerts, often one somewhere every evening. Some- 
times they are good concerts, and in our great metro- 
politan centers of population it is on such occasions 
that you get a sense of the artistic sensibilities and 
traditions which our foreign-born citizens pack in 

92 




BAND CONCERTS ARE THE FIRST TRAINING OF OUR MUSIC-LOVING PUBLIC 



CITY SUMMERS 



their flimsy rope-bound trunks when they make the 
great migration to the West. To sit under the park 
trees some August night (in a heat that might, in- 
deed, at once melt and fuse these ahen races) and 
watch queer, eager, dark faces light up all around 
you, is to believe that we have here in America, from 
one source and another, all the materials for that 
"musical public" of which we have all so long talked 
and dreamed. But nothing so unimportant as 
music — or the drama — must delay the majestic and 
inevitable flow of our thoughts toward something 
greater, the dance. 

It was only a short while ago that America became 
definitely enmeshed in the tango, tripped up by the 
turkey-trot. During the past few years dancing has 
been almost our one great national interest. At in- 
tervals during the long, dim history of our ancient 
world, dancing manias have seized upon it. Gen- 
erally the frenzy has been for religion instead of, 
as now, for hygiene and pleasure; but, fantastic 
though it may appear, the present craze for "rag- 
time" dancing has to the imaginative observer 
something of the same barbaric and epic quality. 
When Cleveland opens a municipal dance-hall in 
one of her parks, it is as if Rome threw open the 
Colosseum for the Saturnalia. It is interesting to 
see the mayors of cities, who in modern American 
life have replaced the Church as the guardians of 

93 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

our morals, endeavoring to regulate the dance — why 
do mayors not visit Niagara Falls of a Sunday and 
try to stop the cataract by throwing a little sand 
in front of it? The dance regulates itself, and the 
action of the national good sense and taste has al- 
ready worked wonders with it. The questionable 
features with which it arrived — straight from San 
Francisco's late lamented Barbary Coast, so it was 
alleged — have already subsided. The " turkey-trot " 
has become a simple ** one-step," and since we are 
naturally, as dancers, a lithe and graceful race, 
beauty has already begun to emerge from its gro- 
tesqueness. We still like rough and tough words in 
America, and lovely and refined young girls do not 
hesitate to say that they do the "kitchen sink" or 
hope to learn the "hang-over" (both sweetly named), 
but the dance itself has grown charming. Inci- 
dentally, there is perhaps too much talk of its 
"Americanism" and its "modernity." The "one- 
step" as it is most prettily executed by us is exactly 
what you may see the Spanish peasants dance upon 
the greensward in little country fiestas of a Sunday 
afternoon — little festivals which have not changed 
their character for a century. 

For many years there has been no dancing in 
towns during the summer. There was an early, 
pleasant period of it in our grandfather's and great- 
grandfather's days, when our great cities were still 

04 



CITY SUMMERS 



almost like villages; it is quaint and agreeable for 
the New-Yorker to read that in the warm weather 
of the early nineteenth century they had "hop 
night" at the old Astor House. At last we are 
again able to dance in the city — every summer 
night is "hop night'* now. There is dancing on 
the roofs, in the moonlight, on the verandas of sub- 
urban road-houses, and even in the hot dining-rooms 
of restaurants. It flourishes in winter, too, but in 
the city's summer it seems somehow more spontane- 
ous. And the pleasantest feature of it is that, in 
these free, wholesome breezes of ours, the dance-hall, 
though often called a "jardin" or a "palais de 
danse,'' loses what in our parlance may be termed 
its Parisian quality. It is the respectable haunt, 
if not exactly of families, at least of young men and 
young women, who in the best possible way cling 
to our good old tradition that the American girl 
needs no chaperon. There are certain of these 
new dancing-places where, so it is said, an official 
introducer will, upon urgent application, and with 
the consent of both parties, allow the forming of an 
acquaintance; but it must be for one dance only. 
In the intervals of performances by the general and 
amateur public, professional practitioners appear 
upon the floor in "whirlwind waltzes" or stately 
"tangoes" from the Argentine, which at least serve 
the purpose of letting the public get its breath for 

95 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

the next round. The dance is, to sum it all up, the 
one new great feature of our American summers. 

But we are perhaps keeping too long away from 
the bathing-beaches; the cooling-off processes of the 
summer are, after all, more permanently important 
than the warming-up ones. A beach, near a city, 
is wherever water of any description meets land. A 
delightful example is a resort near the metropolis 
advertising "surf bathing," the waves for which are 
mechanically produced in a large fresh-water tank 
which stands on a high cliff overlooking a river! 

The cities themselves have at last come to see 
that they must begin to provide their citizens with 
chances for immersion. New York floats baths in 
her great salt rivers ; Chicago and the other lakeside 
towns utilize the parks that lie by their blue inland 
seas; and Boston has constructed a palatial estab- 
lishment on her chief beach. But more interesting, 
fuller of the piquant contrasts that make our latter- 
day America romantic, is the bathing-place in the 
New England capital which lies at the very tip of 
the ancient town, under the shadow of Copp's Hill 
and that lovely steeple of the Old North Church 
where they hung the lantern for Paul Revere. 
There, in the grime of the commercial quarter, by 
the clatter of the elevated trains, there is a small 
cove and a little sandy beach. (Near by, just to 
remind us that Boston does not forget her slums, 

96 




DAXCING HAS BECOME OUR ONE GREAT NATIONAL INTEREST 



CITY SUMMERS 



at morning and night floats the hospital-ship which 
daily carries ailing children out to the healing airs 
of the great bay of Massachusetts.) And in these 
historic waters swim and frolic the small Irish and 
Italian and Hebrew progeny of Boston's three great 
alien races. There is a swimming master, there 
are races under his direction and that of local 
committees of aquatic sportsmen. There is, in 
short, under almost impossible conditions, an amaz- 
ing atmosphere of that remoter seaside where the 
rich can go, and it is brought to the very door of 
the tenements. 

Bathing at the great beaches on a Saturday or 
Sunday or a hot holiday is on a gigantic, almost a 
monstrous, scale. The capacity of sea and sands 
becomes almost a matter of mathematical computa- 
tion. Land and water are just barely visible — the 
human body and bathing-suit completely fill the 
eye. In the waves certain restricted arm move- 
ments and short kicks are possible; on the beach the 
packing literally forces upon the observ^er the classic 
allusion to the sardine. Coney Island may stand as 
the type and symbol of such beaches. It is the 
arch bathing-place of the whole world — nowhere 
else do so many human beings simultaneously touch 
water. There the tide of bathers overflows even 
beyond the sands. Groups may be discovered, still 
in swimming costume, sitting peacefully down to 

97 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

eat lunch or to imbibe soda, even to play cards. It 
is regretted by many that dancing in bathing-suits 
is forbidden at the best pavilions. The ideal of a 
large part of our population unquestionably would 
be to spend the whole day in a bathing-suit; the 
supremely elegant might possibly, when the suit 
was dry, pull on a pair of ordinary trousers. Such 
a life permits of the burning and tanning processes 
being carried on to perfection. The ordinary Ameri- 
can young man realizes that he is enjoying himself 
at the seaside only when his skin begins to peel. 
And at the city beaches, the bathers, who are all 
snatching a mere occasional afternoon from work, 
can afford to lose no time at the work of broiling and 
browning. 

And yet it is dijQScult even for them to bathe all 
day, for a myriad other delightful experiences beck- 
on, so tantalizingly rich does life seem at our pleas- 
ure-parks. When you have cooled your blood in 
the water you may curdle it on land by risking your 
life upon roller coasters or in the loops, or, even more 
satisfactorily, by seeing others risk theirs in various 
foolhardy exhibitions. There is a melodramatic 
richness and abandon in the language used to adver- 
tise such "shows." Automobile races are pleas- 
antly described as "neck to neck with death"; but 
they seem mild compared with "auto-polo," which 
is alleged to be nothing less than "hell's pastime." 

98 



CITY SUMMERS 



The appeal to primitive emotion is indeed made 
whenever possible. Most of the innumerable " mirth- 
provoking" devices reduced to their essentials are 
really only variants of the funniest thing in the 
world — the man who slips upon a banana peel. 
The philosopher will find food for his meditations 
everywhere — in fact, those who purvey pleasure to 
the multitude are often themselves consciously 
philosophers. For example, the manager of a re- 
cent successful novelty, which displayed a wealth 
of cheap crockery and allowed you to throw a ball 
and smash as much of it as your skill permitted, ap- 
pealed very felicitously to the domestically inclined 
in these terms: "If you can't do it at home, boys, 
do it here!" 

There is no need for description of the various 
amusements of the summer carnival grounds; al- 
most every city in the country has its Luna Park, 
modeled on the one at Coney which made the moon 
famous. Comment alone is possible. One may 
note, for example, the eternal appeal of gambling — 
how for almost twenty years now the Japanese have 
flourished on the rolling ball, the dullest of all games. 
One may call attention to the ebb and flow of various 
amusements in the public favor — of the rifle-range, 
perhaps, which after long years seems to enjoy fresh 
vogue. One may felicitate the nation on its senti- 
mental loyalty through the years to "scenic" repre- 

99 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

sentations of Niagara Falls. And one may marvel 
at the millions upon millions of money invested in 
our summer pleasures, and the thousands upon 
thousands of people engaged in serving them up to 
us, hot as the "dogs" from their grill or the lobsters 
and chickens and green corn from the daily clam- 
bake. There is a huge permanent population at the 
beaches filling hotels, boarding-houses, furnished 
rooms, and odd shacks tucked away in odder cor- 
ners. It must be an agreeable and strange world 
which gathers together at the close of the day, if, 
indeed, the day ever closes — a world which rouses 
a curious man's social ambitions. 

The city Sunday brings the height of the gaiety 
of beaches. The morning has been spent at home in 
the flat. Even in the winter here the gentlemen of 
the household are in shirt-sleeves (our national sign 
of intimate domesticity); in the summer they are 
often merely in undershirts. The minimum of cos- 
tume and the maximum of newspapers make time 
pass pleasantly. The newspapers will, unluckily, 
not be finished before the visit to the beach. They 
will be carried there ultimately to litter and degrade 
the sands. The cheapness and the monstrous size 
of our newspapers are indeed the chief cause of our 
national untidiness in public places. We open great 
green and flowery parks in the middle of our streets, 
and we build great white pleasure cities by our sub- 

100 




H";ii 



A CONEY ISLAND FAIRYLAND 



CITY SUMMERS 



urban waters, only to cover them each day with a 
tattered and wind-blown profusion of dirty paper. 
It must, perhaps, be taken as part and parcel of the 
inextinguishable careless gaiety of the race, of our 
unflagging cheerful vulgarity. The pleasure resort 
of Sunday afternoon has indeed all the qualities 
of the comic supplement of Sunday morning. Half 
the little boys are still called affectionately "Buster," 
although the Brown of that ilk has long ago disap- 
peared from the gaudy-colored pages. Buttons and 
hat-bands with mottoes, donned by bands of lark- 
ish young men — the Apaches of our cities — are all 
evidence of the deep influence newspaper humor 
has had upon our national life. It is diflScult among 
all these gay devices, so bravely flaunted, to choose 
one which shall be — if the phrase be not too pre- 
tentious — enshrined in these pages. But the writer 
remembers as perhaps the pleasantest and most 
characteristic of last summer that seen on the hat- 
bands of the boys of the Butchers' Union making 
holiday near Boston. They bore the invitation, gen- 
erous, though not expressed quite as one would have 
expected in those regions, "Kiss me, Kid — my Kisser's 
sterilized." Concerning tastes in vulgarity there is 
of course no disputing; but the present writer is 
pleased by such evidences that our national well of 
English is still pure and undefiled. 

Amid such tumults and pleasures, linguistic and 

101 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

otherwise, Sunday passes on. Toward the day's 
end there are usually a few drownings or rescues 
from drowning by the life-guards. This is invigo- 
rating to the crowds; it supplies, indeed, the sensation 
which they are accustomed to get from their evening 
paper — which is lacking on Sundays. As the light 
fades over the waters, lights more brilliant begin 
to flash upon the land. One of the inevitable fail- 
ures of language lies in any attempt to describe 
American electric lights — English cannot be made 
to sparkle like ten million incandescents. It is safe 
to pass from these coruscating evening hours to the 
crowded trains and street-cars homeward-bound to 
the tired end of the happy day, and to those few 
hours of sleep grudgingly devoted to making ready 
for Monday morning. 

In town, too, there have been life and crowds. 
Zoos and aquariums claim attention. And the 
parks themselves, with the simple beauty of grove 
and lawn, never pall upon the city population. 
There is, indeed, something about park nature very 
different from what one might call native nature. 
The constant streaming of humanity through it, the 
perpetual disputations upon benches, the eternal 
courtships in shady corners, seem to change the 
aspect of flowers and shrubs, lakes and dells. At 
night, especially, under the dusky trees, the air 
seems, to the real park-lover, to be filled with a kind 

102 



CITY SUMMERS 



of golden star-dust of human happiness and sorrow; 
the beauty of the town's bit of country is more 
poignant to him than ever that of the simple country- 
side itself. 

Year by year we learn more how to utilize our 
parks. They come to have their festivals. May 
day — with white muslin and a May-pole — is cele- 
brated all the length of May and June. Public- 
school children, who have been taught folk dances 
and revels as well as gymnastics, disport themselves 
upon the greensward. We play tennis and baseball, 
too, in the parks. And we are at last learning to 
eat lunch there, and to put the waste paper and egg- 
shells in the proper receptacles. 

We watch others play tennis, and, chiefly, we 
watch them play baseball. Here again the subject 
grows out of hand, becomes epic. To sing of bats 
and the men who toss the nation's heart to and fro 
might perhaps be the greatest American literary 
achievement. It must suflSce here to say that for 
hundreds and hundreds of thousands, professional 
baseball makes the city, with all its withering heat, 
infinitely preferable to the country with its fourth- 
rate amateur games. 

Amateur games, however, flourish and give great 
joy to those engaged in them. They are part of 
what might be called the amateur country life which 
city-dwellers somehow manage in the summer. Be- 

8 103 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

sides parks there are vacant lots, and in the out- 
skirts always open land — no one's boyhood is so 
remote that he does not thrill at the possibilities of 
a vacant lot. With a little courage and imagination 
even children of a larger growth can somehow be- 
lieve that the trackless wilderness exists wherever 
there is space to pitch a tent. Camp colonies within 
the city limits are among the latest and most win- 
ning manifestations of the beneficent paternalism of 
our municipal governments. New York, to take 
perhaps the most striking example, assigns to re- 
spectable citizens who make application in due form 
the right to pitch tents in one of its loveliest un- 
spoiled country parks, by the edge of one of the 
prettiest reaches of the Sound. Nothing more un- 
pretentious, more charming, more characteristically 
American, can be imagined than such a white city 
for the populace; nowhere else could the return to 
nature be so naturally accomplished. The oldest 
(and fewest) of old clothes do for the inhabitants. 
Life in such a camp is frankly, but decently, free 
from shackles. Here in six or seven hundred tents 
you find the really simple life led by families whose 
men come out from the town at night, or by parties 
of young people who thus at a minimum of expense 
obtain from their vacations a maximum of joy. 
To plunge in the sea, to cook one's own food, and to 
dance in the moonlight to the music of a concertina 

104 




^.1/ 



PERPETUAL DISPUTATIONS ENGROSS THE BENCHES 



CITY SUMMERS 



— what more could one ask before one retires to 
sleep like a top beneath snowy canvas? Rus in urbe 
becomes no impossible poet's dream. 

So far we have treated mostly of the devices by 
which those who must stay in town contrive to 
solace themselves. But we must not forget that 
these pleasures can draw people to the towns who 
might easily be healthy and dull at home in the 
country. There is a definite summer season for 
city hotels and a regular demand for furnished flats 
— at reduced rates, naturally, and for the lightest of 
light housekeeping. People from the West come 
East, people from the South come North. They 
swarm in the museums and galleries till you might 
almost think yourself in the British Museum or the 
Louvre. They crowd the sight-seeing automobiles 
till you almost believe there really are sights to see. 
And they fill the restaurants and theaters till you 
doubt whether there is any one in town except peo- 
ple from out of town. 

Boston is perhaps the greatest tourist center, in 
the regulation European red-guide-book manner. It 
is at once the cradle of our liberties and the inventor 
of the sight-seeing trolley-car. Here education 
bears fruit and the Daughters of the American Revo- 
lution come into their own. The intelligence of 
Boston is amazing, but it is as nothing compared 
with the intelligence of other cities about Boston. 

105 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

If you will sit peacefully some summer morning in 
a quiet corner of that beautiful old Faneuil Hall, you 
will see all America go by — in samples — and you 
will be forced to admit that your chair compares 
favorably with those somewhat more famous ones 
of the Cafe de la Paix in Paris, from which, if you 
sit long enough, you see every one in the world pass. 
The realization is gradually coming to us as a nation 
that the land is growing old, and that our seventeenth 
and eighteenth century relics have as much the ro- 
mantic and picturesque quality as buildings of that 
same period in Europe, where we have long and 
affectionately recognized thern as "antiques." There 
is something stirring in the little troops of city 
sight-seers; they mark our national coming of age; 
they are witness of the finer bloom which, while 
most of us are unaware of it, is stealing over the 
surface of our old civilization. 

It is not altogether fantastic to suppose that we 
are upon the point of becoming the playground of 
Europe — which has so long been ours. Once, to 
take but one example, it was suflficient for a con- 
noisseur of painting to know the European galleries; 
now he must at least know New York, Boston, 
Chicago, Pittsburg, and our private collections. 
The city summer may yet undergo stranger trans- 
formations. We may soon hang our Id on parle 
Frangais, Man spricht Deutsch, and all the signs that 

106 



CITY SUMMERS 



correspond to that pleasantly ingratiating English 
spoken which one sees everywhere abroad. The red- 
capped negro porters at the railway stations may 
begin taking courses at the school for languages. 
And the foreign servants, whose inadequate English 
we now so loudly curse, may be found admirably 
suited to cater to our tourist trade. 

One way and another, is not the summer city a 
pleasant place .^^ — and the city summer, if your heart 
is gay, as happy as any other period? The town- 
dweller is never really town-bound; if he has a half- 
day only, he can escape by boat or rail for what 
the advertising folders so prettily call a "vacation- 
ette." And aren't many " vacationettes " pleasanter 
than one long sentence to the country .^^ The year- 
round country-dweller is the man who can tell you 
the truth. For him the summer town is one round 
of pleasure. Aren't there even "movies" that be- 
gin at nine in the morning, when in the country 
there is nothing better than the silly dew upon the 
grass? 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



V 

WINTER HOLIDAYS 

THAT it can be winter in one place while it is 
summer in another is the simplest fact of geog- 
raphy, yet it is for most of us a constant marvel. 
When the snow flies in our native North we childishly 
feel it to be quite impossible that in the South, so 
easily attainable in a Pullman car, the groves are 
fragrant with white blossoms. 

Just to see the palmetto's plumy crest against the 
blue of the sub-tropic sky or the orange's gold against 
the glossy green of its foliage is a holiday. Merely 
to put on a linen suit and sit reading of blizzards in 
the North is a vacation. There is a quite absurd 
thrill which goes through one upon picking one's 
first orange from the tree. Stories of the old days 
of plenty in Florida and California, when heaping 
baskets of the fruit stood in hotel oflSces for the free 
use of the guests, now sound like legends of some 
earlier Arcadian golden age. 

The shortest Southern trip has always something 

exotic and adventurous in it; in a quiet New Eng- 

111 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

land village a great position of authority in the 
community may be founded upon a trip to Cali- 
fornia or Florida. Indeed, over the southern horizon 
toward the Gulf, the Indies, and old Mexico there 
always flickers and dances the will-o'-the»wisp of 
romance leading the tourist on with memories of the 
gay antebellum time and earlier cloudier legends 
of Spanish days, of the Fountain of Youth and the 
golden sands of El Dorado. There is glamour for 
young and old in the winter holiday, and for the 
latter what might at least be termed a fighting 
chance of finding weather warm enough to reach 
the marrow of their old bones. If letters from "the 
folks at home" convey the welcome news that they 
are shivering in arctic airs, the last touch of geniality 
is added to the Southern sun. 

This question of weather must, however, be deli- 
cately handled. The only safe rule for the winter 
traveler in search of warmth is to start toward the 
equator and to keep on till he reaches it. It would 
appear to be incontestable that down there it is 
warm enough, but our own sub-tropics, Florida and 
California, are the scene yearly of intolerable suffer- 
ing from the cold. There is a conspiracy of silence 
concerning winter climates — the Californian infant is 
said to learn the word " exceptional " at his mother's 
breast, and to be taught to apply it at once to the 
weather, and the returned tourist from Florida 

112 



aansaaBsntpnc 




THERE IS GLAMOUR FOR YOUXG AND OLD IN THE WINTER HOLIDAY 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



rarely confesses to the spring days when he cowered 
Qver a lukewarm radiator in a thinly built hotel. 
It is possible that here in these pages the truth 
about Southern climate is for the first time set down. 
The impulse is, however, but momentary, for while 
the female reader is advised that when she packs 
her trunk for the South she must put in her flannels, 
it is true, on the whole, that the South really is sl 
land of filmy frocks and roses and orange-blossoms 
and sunshine. 

It is possible that even while the Floridas — East 
and West, as they were pleasantly called in those 
days — were successively British and Spanish, an 
occasional adventurous American passed the winter 
in the quiet little provincial capitals of St. Augus- 
tine and Pensacola. At any rate, it is certain that 
soon after the land became ours the tourist was seen. 
It was difficult traveling, and sometimes dangerous 
living — one of the earliest nineteenth-century years 
saw a sanatorium on one of the keys tragically 
visited by a marauding and murdering band of 
Seminole Indians. Now the sea-going railroad has 
been romantically flung to Key West across these 
same low islands and turquoise waters, and limited 
trains, exotically loaded with gay, chattering, be- 
diamonded Cubans and Mexicans, oddly mixed with 
nice old ladies from Michigan, rush to and fro in the 
modernest way. The modernest Florida is indeed 

113 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

the Florida to visit and to write about, but it is 
pleasant for an instant to try to recapture something 
of the nineteenth-century days before the great 
sleepy state had waked at the touch of Northern 
enterprise. 

You went to St. Augustine then from the St. 
Johns River by a little railroad on which the trains 
politely stopped if any of the passengers wished to 
gather magnolia-flowers from the trees along the 
way. You made your way down the long east 
coast upon intermittent and spasmodic steamers, 
and at least once along the lagoons found that the 
only hotel was a disused river craft anchored near 
one of the inlets from the ocean, and managed by 
an ex-captain who had earlier sailed these same 
waters. That, too, was the golden period of orange- 
growing, before the famous and fatal "big freeze," 
when contented planters, their rich future hanging 
heavily, so they thought, upon the branches of their 
own trees, were content to forget the old Northern 
world from which they had come to this paradise 
of plenty. These were the days of odd, foreign 
settlers, adventurous younger sons of transatlantic 
aristocracy, and strange, battered, and world-worn 
adventurers who beached the romantic crafts of 
their lives at last upon those tropic sands. These 
were the Floridians who, even after the famous frost 
had literally sweot everything away, fantastically 

114 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



preserved the ways of better days, dressed to dine 
upon corned-beef hash, and played bridge for a fiftieth 
of a cent a point because bridge was fashionable in 
the London drawing-rooms. 

This is an almost-forgotten Florida now, for the 
world and the railway have captured it. Yet for 
a real lover of the great, queer, desolate, flat penin- 
sula there is always some hint of magic in even the 
modernest manifestations and hotels. Palm Beach, 
for example, was built almost in a single night, and 
though it has now existed long enough to make even 
the most skeptical have some faith in its perma- 
nency, it still suggests how the maker of this region 
did "himself a stately pleasure-dome decree" upon 
the eastern coast. It would not be hard to believe 
that when April comes and the last black "bell- 
hop" — slave of the ring — has answered the last 
visitor's call, the whole phantasmagoria sinks be- 
neath the sands like some palace in an Arabian tale, 
to reappear when the magician again starts his 
limited trains a-running and sends evil frosts to 
desolate the North. 

Palm Beach is our most satisfactory achievement 
in watering-places along the traditional European 
lines. It has as preposterously short and perfervid 
a season as Trouville or Deauville. It has prices — 
if you insist on them — as high and as really exhila- 
rating as those at Monte Carlo; you believe, at least 

115 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

while you abandon yourself to the Palm Beach spell, 
that not to be rich is something unworthy and dis- 
creditable, something not to be mentioned before 
nice people. The presence in the lobbies of sight- 
seeing tourists from cheaper hotels near by merely 
accentuates one's own feeling of wealth, just as the 
coming of occasional little groups of Seminole In- 
dians makes more vivid one's sense of how incredible 
this luxury is in what was only so short a time ago 
a remote wilderness at the edge of the trackless mys- 
tery of the Everglades. 

Palm Beach is fantastically rich and idle and gay 
— and useless, if you like. It is a kind of dream of 
blazing flower-gardens and allees of palms. Its 
most characteristic sport is the wheel-chair — the 
Afro-mobile, so called from the black slave of the 
pedal who propels you. The golfers who languidly 
dot the flat green seem only to do it that they may 
make wheel-chair idleness the more attractive. In 
the same way watching the bathers from under a 
striped awning competes on fair terms with bathing 
itself. And eating and drinking here tend to be- 
come not only kings of indoor, but of outdoor sports. 
The games of chance, too, which so enliven the 
quest of rest and health abroad, are discreetly pro- 
vided, and in the agreeable confusion of the tables 
certain ideals of democracy — that is to say, ideals 
for the fraternizing of the rich — are satisfied. 

116 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



Indeed, one of the chief recommendations of Palm 
Beach is the fact that all its gaiety is in the open. 
The only thing private about the resort is the private 
car which is ordinarily used by people going there, 
and lately it is said that even this is not absolutely 
de rigueur. Life is lived wholly in the public eye, 
except in the few hours devoted to sleep, and even 
then the somewhat thin construction of the hotels 
makes the night yield only a qualified seclusion — 
one is still in the public ear. At the bathing-hour 
willing and polite photographers from all the leading 
newspapers give one the agreeable sensation of being 
able, if one wishes, to dip not merely in the public, 
but in the national eye. The golden haze of jour- 
nalistic publicity is over everything. And as there 
are times when it happens that no one fearfully 
fashionable takes a cocktail at the morning concert, 
tangoes upon the veranda, or indulges in what is 
rather cloyingly described as a "twilight tea" in the 
gardens, the not fearfully fashionable may hope in 
such crises for an uplift in the newspaper columns. 
As to actual social mountaineering, both the data 
and the wish to deal with it are lacking here. But 
it is said that members of New York's Four Hundred 
wishing to meet rich Westerners find Palm Beach 
the very best field for such ambitious activities. 

It would be possible to pretend that all our 
national search for winter climates is conducted 

117 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

upon some such high plane of elegance as Palm 
Beach's. But the truth is that nowhere better than 
in the myriad other resorts of both Florida and 
California can one see what a huge, plain, simple, 
leisure class ours really is. We are still profoundly 
democratic — all God's gifts of warmth and sunshine 
belong to every one of us. There is an enormous 
deal of talk, both at home and abroad, about Ameri- 
can pretentiousness. But any close observation of 
our winter resorts would show that no nation in the 
world is so content to live in second-class hotels 
and boarding-houses or in tiny bungalows where 
*' mother," with the occasional help of some incom- 
petent local negress, does her own work while 
"father" talks about the climate with the fellow who 
lives next door. Here still exists that vigorous, if 
crabbed, earlier American tradition — to which every- 
thing which could be contemptuously summed up as 
"style" was anathema. This is the "backbone of 
the nation" — the backbone to support which was 
especially devised the rocking-chair, perhaps our 
greatest American invention. 

We not only take winter trips, but we colonize 
our sub-tropics in enormous numbers. Old people 
already retired from active life and young people 
who have early learned the folly of struggling with 
the cold have made a really majestic emigration, 
particularly to California. Los Angeles, which 

118 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



would appear to be in a fair way to become the 
land's metropolis, is reported by a gentleman lately re- 
turned from there to boast a population entirely com- 
posed of Eastern people and moving-picture actors. 
Does it not somehow suggest a community wholly 
devoted to the polite arts of leisure? The country 
districts, too, receive their settlers, who have been 
invited there by grandiloquent booklets describing 
the way in which wealth, health, and happiness are 
all to be secured by turning agriculturist or truck- 
farmer. This "return to the land" is not a return; 
it is a voyage to a distant country, often unknown 
except in dreams, where the happy settler sits be- 
fore his cabin door under the shade of his own 
grape-fruit or breakfast tree. The grandiloquent 
gaudy booklets sometimes lie; still, it is true that in 
California water will make even the desert blossom 
as the rose and that in Florida the white sand of 
the sea-beach will serve for a kitchen garden; so 
the city-weary immigrant does really come into 
tropic lands of miracle. Something hinting at hap- 
piness hangs over the countryside in these regions; 
the inhabitants are not there merely because they 
were born there; they have come there because of 
their own well-directed efforts — a distinction which 
holds good of earth and heaven, when you come to 
think of it. 

It would be more natural, speaking of American 
9 119 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

holidays, to speak only of those upon American soil. 
But the romantic Southern horizon has receded 
farther — the winter holiday now takes us from the 
Florida where Ponce de Leon sought the Fountain of 
Youth back to the lands from which he sailed upon 
his quest. There is a new South beyond the South 
— Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all the Antilles, toward 
the Isthmus and our Canal, which have lately come 
into the winter-tourist belt, considerably enlarging 
and adorning it. It calls for mention. It is a 
region of strange tropic fruits, sad songs of love, 
the gay, barbaric music of the dan^on, storied cities 
of the Spanish Main, and the palaces of black em- 
perors now crumbling in the jungle. At last we 
have recognized the fact that Havana, just across 
the Straits of Florida, is more Spanish than Spain, 
as is bewildered half -Indian Mexico, and that noth- 
ing is so "foreign" as our own hemisphere. Even 
if our holidays only let us crush for a half -hour with 
our heel an alien soil, there is some magic in the 
experience — for years all Coronado Beach visitors 
have crossed the border to Mexico and sagely won- 
dered why we did not annex it. 

In the regions only half-way south, where, instead 
of being summer in winter, it is rather a crisp au- 
tumn, "sport" becomes more important than idle- 
ness, and fashion, dressed in gray and brown and 
greenish tweeds and gay sweaters, again a promi- 

120 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



nent figure. Aiken, Camden — and suddenly to jump 
half the continent, Colorado Springs — all are of this 
brisk, horsy, frost-in-the-morning and wood-fire-in- 
the-evening kind of places. Here no hammock is 
swung between the banana-trees, but the golf-clubs 
are out, the polo-mallets ready, and the fox (once a 
mere pathetic survival of antebellum aristocracy, 
but now again a fashionable animal) trembles in 
the thickets. Romance here is of the girl with the 
clear eye and bright cheeks, who knows the sunrise 
and the morning dew, and has perhaps at some full 
of the Southern moon hunted by its light across the 
transfigured Carolinian country. 

These are the places where the liver has no chance 
to relapse into its well-beloved torpidity. Life is 
keyed to high activity — it is alleged that even the 
operation for appendicitis is in fashionable circles 
only allowable if it can be accomplished while you 
are dummy at auction. There is a tremendous 
amount of open-air sleeping and early rising; the 
winter visitors are all healthy (or had better be), 
almost always wealthy, and very likely sometimes 
wise. The Scotch whisky is exceptionally good, 
often imported by the sportsmen themselves from 
the Caledonian moors where in late summer and au- 
tumn they worry the British game bird. 

Cosmopolitan oases these, where we Americans 
bring home, like spoil from our bucaneering trips 

121 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

abroad, all that we have learned of country-life in 
other lands. We have English servants, but they 
bring breakfast to the bedrooms in the Continental 
fashion and deal intrepidly with bath-rooms and open 
plumbing in a way never to be acquired in Britain. 
Negro cooks prepare risotto and Italians learn how 
to turn a buckwheat-cake. The manners and cus- 
toms of our most civilized classes in America are 
quite as much in the melting-pot as those of our least. 
We are still feverishly engaged in assimilating and 
acclimatizing foreign ways, plowing, fertilizing, and 
cultivating the whole field of national life. In the 
most unpretentious suburban home the observant 
guest can generally tell by the little details of the 
housekeeping with what part of Europe the hostess 
is most familiar and which she admires most. The 
actual results are, of course, extremely unimportant; 
it really would make no difference whether you break- 
fasted off cafe au lait, cold sausage and cheese, or 
pie; but in the interests of international peace and 
amenity it is a good thing to recognize that something 
is to be said for all the nations' ways of beginning 
the day. 

We were on our way North, however, and there 
is more to be said while we linger in these half-way 
regions. First of all the return to the North is al- 
most invariably made too soon. There is something 
curiously inaccessible to fact in the tourist mind. 

122 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



When the southeast wind blows and roses and mag- 
nolias blossom it will not realize that in the North 
nothing but pneumonia flourishes. The tourist 
should delay till the cypress has put forth its green 
fringes, and all the deciduous trees of the woodlands 
have announced the spring, till even the barren sand- 
dunes grow gay with wild morning-glories and the 
soft, yellow flowers of the spiny cactus. Then he 
should slowly go northward, "following the spring," 
as the well-worn but always pretty phrase advises. 
On the way back the leisurely traveler will do a 
little sight-seeing. He will, if he is wise, stop at 
Charleston, where he will see, in its green Battery 
looking seaward toward historic Moultrie, and in the 
beautiful old houses which still border it, the most 
nearly perfect relic of an earlier aristocracy that we 
can show. A much-traveled English gentleman says 
that in Charleston he saw, for the first and only 
time in his life, a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
hanging in the place it was painted for! There is 
Richmond, too, and for those bound west and north- 
west, Atlanta, Chattanooga, with Lookout Moun- 
tain and Missionary Ridge to send one again to read- 
ing the history of our great war. And there is New 
Orleans, still and always our one siren among cities. 
Year by year rises the chorus of lamentation over 
the passing of her picturesqueness and her Latin 
fascinations — year by year she still offers to the 

123 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

sentimental tourist a carnival of gay and romantic 
impressions quite beyond what her tumultuous, 
much-advertised Mardi Gras can give. 

Summer in winter (or, not to be too economical 
of the truth, mild weather at that season) having 
proved such a profitable investment for the South 
financially as well as romantically, it cannot be won- 
dered at that envious regions farther north should 
have invented the Gulf Stream. This good-natured 
current has now for a long time tempered the climate 
at Old Point Comfort and Atlantic City, and within 
the last few years has very amiably turned in at 
Long Beach, near New York. In fact, it does not 
seem to be able to resist the attraction of a new hotel 
with a good restaurant a la carte and a "board- 
walk." At once it washes that shore. 

The all-year-round seaside resort, although prob- 
ably originally invented at Brighton, England, has 
been brought completely up to date at Atlantic 
City, New Jersey, and as such is one of the most 
important and amazing facts about America. It, 
with the South, has completely broken down the old 
American tradition that the vacation was for women 
and children two months, July and August, and for 
'paterfamilias two weeks of the latter. Nowadays 
it is always vacation-time if — to put it vulgarly — 
you have the price. The value to the health of a 
week or a week-end at Atlantic City disarms at once 

124 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



any unfavorable criticism. And to stay at a luxuri- 
ous modern hotel with running hot and cold sea- 
water in your bath-room, to sun yourself in a glass- 
inclosed terrace or in an equally well-protected 
rolling - chair, and to have for your evenings an 
occasional new play "tried out," as the phrase 
(reminiscent of the whaling industry and blubber) 
goes, is to have the rigors of the search for health 
so considerably mitigated that it need dismay no 
one. 

The statement must, perhaps, be for the moment 
somewhat modified if one considers the odd custom 
of midwinter bathing which has grown so of recent 
years. With the spread of steam-heating and open 
plumbing it became impossible for the rudely vigor- 
ous any longer to shake the snow from the counter- 
pane on rising and, breaking the ice in the pitcher, 
administer to the virile frame the cold douche which 
made our fathers what they were — the tub with hot 
and cold faucets was never quite Spartan enough. 
But now that we have the pretty invention of New- 
Year's day on the beach, with larking on the sands in 
bathing-suits and plunging later with gleeful Viking 
laughter into the icy waves, every one can publicly 
manifest his strength. This includes, of course, 
the inevitable old man who has preserved himself 
into the nineties by these preposterous incursions. 
Atlantic City, like other winter resorts by the 

125 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

Northern sea, must boast of its band of amiable 
bathing maniacs, if only to make manifest that the 
real goal of its existence is a curative one. For 
though health is unquestionably the solid sub- 
structure upon which Atlantic City is built, yet it 
must be admitted that the foundation is so well 
built over as often to be completely concealed — the 
unphilosophical might easily call the place simply 
a pleasure resort. 

Atlantic City is, in this aspect, what Coney Island 
would be if it had all the Broadway hotels and a 
goodly number of the Fifth Avenue shops lined up 
behind it. The blend is unlike anything to be found 
elsewhere in the world. All people of refinement 
must agree, arguing about it as an academic ques- 
tion, that it is a dreadful place, and yet, oddly 
enough, it is not at all dreadful, but exactly what the 
majority of us really like. The simple proof is that 
the majority of us visit it. Exclusiveness and quiet 
are not what goes to our heads in America — intoxi- 
cation is instead to be secured from a great good- 
natured brew of every class in the community. 
Nothing is more characteristic of this amazing qual- 
ity of the place than its chess and checkers players — 
a class everywhere predisposed, so one would have 
said, to quiet and seclusion. Here they serenely 
practise their skill at the entrance to one of the 
piers, cheered by a band and a raucous-voiced boy 

126 




FOR THE RURAL VISITOR THE BOARDWALK HAS ITS IRRESISTIBLE ATTRACTION 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



inviting public patronage for a fortune-teller. You 
are forced to recognize that they find a real rest 
in the change from the quiet of their games at 
home. 

All America comes to Atlantic City. The boys 
who run the stands which purvey "home news- 
papers" have an agreeable game of judging at a 
glance where you come from and crying out insinu- 
atingly as you pass by, "How about that Chicago 
Tribune?'* "How about that Cleveland Leader?'' 
"How about that Courier- Journal?" And so on, 
with preternatural and satiric acuteness as to local 
flavors and eccentricities of physiognomy and dress. 
(Their only competitor in the writer's memory is the 
combined barber, manicure, and pedicure who issues 
forth from his tiny shack upon the beach at the Ve- 
netian Lido and, pausing before the bathers, who 
are attired in a close approximation of nature's 
garb, addresses each one in his correct "home lan- 
guage," English, German, French, Hungarian, or 
Italian, his judgment being founded solely on face 
and figure, and the way various national skins burn 
or tan beneath the Adriatic sun.) 

To catalogue Atlantic City is to catalogue the 
American world — indeed, several worlds. You over- 
hear the New York gentleman at the next table to 
yours, at the gay, smart restaurant, say to the pretty 
woman who is lunching with him, "I'm going to 

127 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

buy my wife a new string of pearls." You catch 
no more, but you feel sure that this is the least 
that he can — and ought to — do. You look out 
of the window and see pa and ma from rural 
Pennsylvania making their way toward a public 
shelter where they will feast on a bag of dough- 
nuts, and you realize in a very queer kind of 
way that this is the America you can laugh at 
while you love; the national banner fluttering in 
the middle distance, whether from a dancing-pa- 
vilion, a moving - picture show, or a chiropodist's 
establishment, stirs an odd but genuine patriotism 
within your breast. 

So far it has been assumed that the winter holi- 
day is undertaken in search of warm weather. For 
as long as he could the writer has clung to the lovely 
tradition of the "old-fashioned winter." We all 
remember that as children we were invariably 
dragged to Thanksgiving dinner upon a sled. The 
reports of the Meteorological OfHce may indicate 
that there has been no snow upon the November 
festival for a half-century — that will not shake our 
faith. Our faith in present-day weather is, how- 
ever, considerably weaker. The writer once had a 
rule that he would not start for Florida until he had 
seen the skating in Central Park — he was soon 
obliged to give it up, for he ran the risk during mild 
winters of never going South until some blizzard 

128 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



of late March or early April froze the lakes with 
the breath of spring. The result has been inevitable 
— the holiday in search of cold weather. The second 
rule for winter traveling is to keep on toward the 
north pole! 

There was an earlier golden age of this glorifica- 
tion of the frost — when Montreal had its ice palace 
and its winter carnival, as had also the Twin Cities 
of Minnesota. This was the time when toboggan- 
slides adorned our hillsides and toboggan-caps 
graced the heads of our youth, male and female, 
more especially the heads of such as never slid the 
slide. (The record in dress by the non-sporting 
of the passing tastes of the sportsmen is one of the 
most agreeably ridiculous customs of our national 
life. Who does not remember gratefully the vogue 
of the yacht-cap among landlubbers? Who has not 
some precious memory of it, worn, say, to the thea- 
ter, with evening dress .^^ At the moment no pretty 
fashion of this kind exists, but the writer hopes that 
soon the aviator's costume may be the favorite wear 
for traveling in the subways.) 

Ice palaces and carnivals are of a more naive 
earlier period when pleasure was merely pleasure. 
Now it has become fresh air and health and sport. 
The toboggan has been largely ousted by our own 
indigenous bob - sled, which has met with such 
social success at St. Moritz and other Swiss winter 

129 



IN VACATION AMERICA 

resorts of the British aristocracy that it is now 
fashionable even at home. We shde, we skate, 
we play hockey on the ice, we skee. After all, 
we invented the sweater in America. Why should 
we not wear it? 

The winter may be dull and "slushy" in our towns, 
but "up country" in the snow-clad hills and by the 
ice-bound lakes and streams the weather is the 
kind we make so well in America, the brisk, clear, 
tingling winter, with the sun bright upon dry, pow- 
dery snow — the only weather, to put it briefly, 
which can for a moment risk comparison with South- 
ern airs heavy with the scent of orange-blossoms. 
The winter holiday where it is winter in winter is in 
its infancy only, but it bids fair to rival the holiday 
where it is summer in winter. It has the advantage 
of never being an admission of age or illness, but, 
instead, a boast of youth and health, ready to face 
with red cheeks and gaiety the challenge of the 
frost. 

The country, as opposed to the town, is still in- 
creasingly successful every year. People who can 
afford it (doubtless some who can't) keep the coun- 
try house open — or half-way open — through the 
whole winter, and go to it for Thanksgiving or the 
"old-fashioned Christmas" or just for week-end 
flurries in the snow. And, let it be whispered low, 
there are country people who make holiday in town 

180 



WINTER HOLIDAYS 



in winter and who love the sight of snowflakes glit- 
tering against the Hghts of Broadway. Indeed, if 
the heart is gay and times are prosperous, one some- 
times feels that the whole American year is one 
long holiday. 



THE END 



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